Rector's Ramblings

A sermon on Revelation 11:1-19

OK, let me start tonight’s exposition with a touch of honesty…Everything I say to you tonight might be completely wrong! I am happy to admit each week that there are parts of the passage I don’t understand but this week, we come to a passage that is almost incomprehensible and there are so many different interpretations as to what it means that it is almost impossible to come to any firm conclusions. I would suggest to you that anyone who says that they understand this passage is either naïve or arrogant or far more clever than all Biblical commentators throughout history added together! But we are on a journey together and so we will journey through tonight’s passage and I will try and give as much illumination as I am able to as we go.

You’ll remember that, last week, John gave as an interlude, an intermission between the sounding of the sixth trumpet and the sounding of the seventh trumpet and, for the first part of tonight’s passage, verse 1-13, we are still in that interlude.

And last week, we saw that the message John had to give us was quite simple: that in the last days, in which we are living, before the final judgement, the task of the church is to proclaim the Gospel to the nations and to have a prophetic ministry, speaking out against social injustice. And John told us this would be a bittersweet experience because the Gospel of salvation and judgement is, itself, bittersweet.

And it seems to me that, in 11:1-13, John is carrying on with this theme and what he is saying to us is that the church in the last days will face persecution as it carries out its responsibilities for mission. Now, we need to be clear that John is specific about the fact that not every Christian will be persecuted in the last days but that there will be persecution and, in verse 1-13, the nature of that persecution is outlined for us. And then, in verse 15-19, the seventh trumpet is sounded and we will come on to that later. But first, let’s look through verses 1-13 and reflect on the persecution that the church faces in the last days.

Verses 1&2: “Then I was given a measuring rod like a staff, and I was told, ‘Come and measure the temple of God and the altar and those who worship there, but do not measure the court outside the temple; leave that out, for it is given over to the nations, and they will trample over the holy city for forty-two months.’”

We don’t know who gave John the reed but it would seem to be a stiff reed, the type that grows along the Jordan valley that was often used by surveyors for measuring buildings. And John is told to measure the temple, which is interesting because it’s the first time John is given an instruction to get involved personally in the vision activity: before this moment in Chapter 11, he had been a spectator of all that had gone on. But now he has a job to do: he is to measure the temple of God or, actually, in the Greek, it is the sanctuary of God, not the temple: the inner part of the temple, the holy of Holies.

Now, I won’t bore you with all the interpretations on this verse about how it is the Temple of Jerusalem that is being referred to because I don’t think that’s accurate: we need to retain our adherence to John’s vision as symbolic because, if we don’t, we will find ourselves getting in a real mess later in this chapter. And, up to now, we have seen that everything else has had deep symbolic meaning so there’s no need to shift gear at this stage…So what is the temple to which John refers here?

I think, given the context of what follows and what has come before, it is a reference to the church, the people of God. And, of course, Paul referred to the church as the temple of God in 1 Corinthians 3:16, 2 Corinthians 6:16 and Ephesians 2:21, so there is Biblical precedent for this idea. It is the temple of God – and the altar – that is to be measured and, as we have seen before, the altar is a symbol of the worship life of the people of God. So this command to measure is a command to measure the church that worships God.

But why measure the church? In 2 Samuel 8:2, we see that measuring in this way is for both preservation and for destruction. In that verse about David’s activity, we are told, “He defeated the Moabites and made them lie along the ground, where he measured them off with a length of cord; for every two lengths that were to be put to death one full length was spared.” Remember back to 7:3 where the church of God was sealed: “Do not damage the earth or the sea or the trees, until we have marked the servants of our God with a seal on their foreheads.” So I think that the measuring of the church is another metaphor for its preservation in the light of the seventh trumpet that is about to be sounded.

That is not to say that all Christians will be saved from persecution: we have already had many references in Revelation to persecution and martyrdom. But I think John is giving assurance that, even in the midst of persecution, the church will not be lost.

But, in verse 2, we are told that the outer court is not to be measured because that had been given to the nations or to the Gentiles (the Greek is the same word for both ‘nations’ and ‘Gentiles’). Now, this is a difficult verse to interpret because, at the Temple in Jerusalem, the inner court was reserved for the Jews and the outer court for Gentiles. But, in this part of the vision, it seems that there is a reversal of fortune for the two groups: the Jews are now in the outer court, under the control of the Gentiles, and the Christians have moved in to the inner court. So John challenges the view that the world is divided into Jews and Gentiles and divides the world instead into Christians and Gentiles. Christians – the Church – is the inner court to be measured and preserved and the nations – both Jew and Gentile – will not be measured and preserved.

But then John confuses matters further by bringing in a new metaphor in verse 2: the holy city. Some take this to mean the church but my hunch is that he is referring to God’s creation, the world because it is this that the unbelievers will trample over before the final judgement.

And they will do so, we are told, for forty-two months. Why that time period? Well, it’s a time period we come across many times in Scripture. Sometimes, it is called forty-two months, as here and in 13:5. Sometimes, it is called 1,260 days, as in 11:3 and 12:6. Sometimes, it is called ‘a time, times and half a time’; a ‘time’ being a year, ‘times’ being two years and ‘half a time’ being six months, as in 12:14 and Daniel 7:25 and 12:7. And, on all of these occasions when that measure of time is used in the Bible, it always refers to the period when those opposed to God will unleash their venom and evil activities. It was also the same period of time that Antiochus Epiphanes persecuted the Jews in Jerusalem and so I think John is saying that, just as Epiphanes’ persecution came to an end, so the forces of antichrist will not last for ever but, after a period of time, will be vanquished. Again, a message of encouragement for the early Christians – and for us too.

So we come to verse 3 and we should note that many commentators take verses 1-2 as one picture and 3-13 as a separate picture. There are some very good reasons for thinking this that I won’t bore you with now, mainly related to other Jewish apocalyptic literature. But it may well be that we are moving into a fresh vision here related to verses 1 and 2, but slightly separate…

Verse 3: “And I will grant my two witnesses authority to prophesy for one thousand two hundred and sixty days, wearing sackcloth.” Wow! A complex verse!

First, who are these two prophets? We don’t really know – and there are many, many different interpretations. Some say the witness to God in the Old Testament period and the witness to God in the New Testament period. Some say it is Enoch and Elijah. Some say Elijah and Elisha. Some say Moses and Elijah. Some say the Law and the Prophets. Some say the Law and the Gospel. Some say the Old Testament and the New Testament. There are dozens of suggestions…and I don’t have an answer, I’m afraid. But given the context of the verse, I am inclined to think that it has something to do with the martyrs of God who have stood firm in the face of persecution.

That being the case, why are there only two? What does that number represent? There’s two interpretations, which both prove useful: First, in Deuteronomy 17:6, there is a suggestion that any testimony is only valid when there are two witnesses so having two witnesses here in Revelation 11 suggests that the witness of the martyrs is valid. But a second interpretation, that I quite like actually, is that if you remember back to Chapters 1-3 only 2 of the 7 churches were deemed by God to be faithful: Smyrna and Philadelphia. So perhaps John is giving extra encouragement to the hearers in these two churches by giving them an exalted role in God’s plan here.

And we are not surprised that they are dressed in sackcloth because that is the symbol of mourning and our prophetic role in the last days is to mourn the godlessness of society.

And so, in verse 4, we find John mixing his metaphors: these two witnesses are now called the two olive trees and the two lampstands that stand before the Lord of the earth. Both these images are found in Zechariah 4. What characteristics of the persecuted but faithful church is John drawing out for us here?

First, the olive tree metaphor: there is a link between oil and the Holy Spirit of God so John is saying that the faithful church is the vehicle for the outpouring of the Spirit of God on the world and their dependence of the Holy Spirit for their faith. Second, the lampstand metaphor: we considered this in real depth when we studied Chapter 1 but we remember that the lampstand holds the light of the world.

So in these few verses we have a dynamic picture of the church as a persecuted but faithful body, reliant on the Holy Spirit for its continuance, pouring the Spirit out into the world and shining the light of Christ through its worship and activity. For a group of persecuted believers, this would have been a really encouraging picture and for us, as a small church in 21^st-century Britain, it is still just as encouraging today.

And God’s protection over his witnessing church is further confirmed in verse 5: “And if anyone wants to harm them, fire pours from their mouth and consumes their foes; anyone who wants to harm them must be killed in this manner.” This, of course, is a metaphor and not a call to jihad! The fire is the message of the Gospel, which is like a consuming fire of judgement for those who do not believe. And it’s interesting that John writes, “[they] must be killed in this manner” and the word ‘must’ indicates divine necessity and consequence: it is not a call to arms or a call to the crusades but, rather, an idea that there is a necessary consequence for those who reject the Gospel proclaimed by the church. And, in verse 6, the power of the prophetic Gospel is outlined and we are reminded, perhaps, of Moses’ ministry before Pharaoh, whose heart remained hard, despite the plagues and misfortunes that fell upon his nation: “They have authority to shut the sky, so that no rain may fall during the days of their prophesying, and they have authority over the waters to turn them into blood, and to strike the earth with every kind of plague, as often as they desire.” Again, I don’t think John is calling the church to a literal understanding of this, otherwise we truly would be called to act in vengeance on the world: rather, I think he is trying to express the power of the Gospel and the metaphorical impact of rejecting it, just as the Pharaoh did in the time of Moses.

Verse 7: “When they have finished their testimony, the beast that comes up from the bottomless pit will make war on them and conquer them and kill them.” This is a hard verse for us to get our heads round because it tells us that God has set a period of time for the witnesses to testify and then, when their testimony is over, they will be killed. But that’s the reality of the persecuted church, isn’t it? The beast that comes up from the bottomless pit, which, we saw in Chapter 9, is political opposition to the church, does indeed conquer and kill Christians. And again, we are reminded that the two witnesses are a symbol for a large group of Christian witnesses and not just two individuals because the beast, we are told, “makes war on them” and no political authority “makes war” on only two people.

So we are reminded that some Christians will pay the ultimate price for their faith at the hands of evil political regimes and that they will be treated with shameful disdain, verse 8: “and their dead bodies will lie in the street of the great city that is prophetically called Sodom and Egypt, where also their Lord was crucified.” The Greek is very difficult for this verse, and we have to guess the meaning, really: there is only reference to one body, not two, and there is no verb in the sentence so what it actually says is, “And their body on the street on the street of the great city” but I think it is right to assume that it is their corpses that are left on the street.

And what is the great city? Well, John tells us that it is the city “where also their Lord was crucified” and so we immediately think that it is Jerusalem but I am not convinced because, don’t forget, we are talking about metaphors here and the fact that he also refers to it as Sodom and Egypt draws our mind to cities where wickedness and oppression take place. Wherever wickedness and oppression happen, there the Lord is crucified. So rather than thinking of this as Jerusalem, I think it is a metaphorical reference to any and all cities where there is wickedness and oppression, where Christ is opposed in word and deed: it is there that the faithful proclaimers of the Gospel are killed and treated with disdain and made a laughing stock as their bodies are, metaphorically, left to rot in public view.

And I think the fact that this is a general statement rather than a specific reference to Jerusalem is strengthened by verses 9 & 10: “For three and a half days” – that time period again – “members of the peoples and tribes and languages and nations will gaze at their dead bodies and refuse to let them be placed in a tomb; and the inhabitants of the earth will gloat over them and celebrate and exchange presents, because these two prophets had been a torment to the inhabitants of the earth.” Again, this is metaphorical - and what greater way of heaping shame on someone than not giving them a proper burial but just leaving them to rot at the side of the road; food for the dogs and rats of the city.

And we need to be realistic about the missionary task in which we are engaged: for many, the words of life we bring are a torment to them. There are many who are angry at the Christian witness. There are many who feel judged, who feel their lifestyle is under attack and when they see the church fail, they will rejoice. John is being very realistic here: if the church is truly engaged in the task of mission in the last days, it will be truly uncomfortable and there will be casualties and the world will rejoice at these casualties.

But…

And verse 11 begins with the word, ‘But…’

“…after the three and a half days, the breath of life from God entered them, and they stood on their feet, and those who saw them were terrified”

What vindication!

What triumph for the church of God!

What does Paul say in Romans 8? “What can separate us from the love of Christ? Can affliction, or hardship? Can persecution, hunger, nakedness, danger or sword…we have been treated like sheep for slaughter and yet, through it all, we are more than conquerors through him who loves us.”

This verse in Revelation 11 is the ultimate encouragement towards the resurrection life. The church may be persecuted to the point of extinction, the world may gloat, the world may treat us with disdain, our corporate body may be fed to the dogs and covered with shame - but resurrection is ours in Jesus Christ and the church of Christ shall never be overcome and the people shall be terrified because the Spirit of God, the reviving, resurrecting Spirit is at work within us.

And that is Good News indeed!

And, as we saw in Chapters 1-3, in the letters to the seven churches there awaits for the faithful believers on a earth a great reward in heaven, verse 12: “Then they heard a loud voice from heaven saying to them, ‘Come up here!’ And they went up to heaven in a cloud while their enemies watched them.”

Justification indeed…

And immediately after the removal of the faithful church from earth, as they ascend to heaven, the final days before the horror of the final judgement begin, verse 13: “At that moment there was a great earthquake, and a tenth of the city fell; seven thousand people were killed in the earthquake, and the rest were terrified and gave glory to the God of heaven.” This is an interesting verse for a few of reasons…

First, the proportion mentioned is one-tenth, the only time this proportion is mentioned in Revelation: remember we are used to hearing about a third of things being affected or one quarter being affected. Perhaps the proportion of one-tenth indicates a less impactful consequence than the opening of the seals or bowing of the trumpets.

Second, we are told that seven thousand people are killed which, again, is an interesting number. However, when Revelation was written, the population of Jerusalem was about 70,000, so this seems to be another way of saying ‘one-tenth’.

Third, those left behind gave glory to God, whereas elsewhere we read that the survivors are hardened by the judgements of God. And I think that this new piece of information in Revelation gives us real encouragement in our mission activity because, taken alongside what we have read in previous chapters, it seems that some will hear the Gospel and reject it and become hardened but others will respond and give their lives to God. Our mission activity is never wasted: some respond and some don’t.

So we come to the end of the second woe and, in verse 15, we leave the intermission of Chapter 10 and 11:1-14 and we return again to the main narrative: the blowing of the trumpets. The church has been sealed and the martyrs have been raised and gone to heaven and those who will respond have responded and now, finally, we are ready for the sounding of the final trumpet.

We don’t need to spend too long on this because we know that it represents the final judgement and we don’t have to do too much interpretative work because most of that has been done with regard to the seventh seal a few weeks ago. But let’s follow the story through…

Verse 15: “Then the seventh angel blew his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven…” which, of course, stands in contrast to the silence in heaven when the seventh seal was opened.

“The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah, and he will reign forever and ever.” The rebellion is crushed, evil has been overcome and now is the time for God to reign over his creation.

Verse 16: “Then the twenty-four elder [who represent the church] who sit on their thrones before God fell on their faces and worshipped God…”

Verse 17: “We give you thanks, Lord God Almighty, who was and who is…” That’s interesting, isn’t it? Previously, we have heard “Who was, and is, and is to come” but now, he has come and so the final part of that phrase has become redundant.

“…for you have taken your great power and begun to reign. The nations raged, but your wrath has come, and the time for judging the dead, for rewarding your servants, the prophets and saints and all who fear your name, both small and great, and for destroying those who destroy the earth.” The end has come – the final judgement is here and the church will be vindicated at last.

And we are left in suspension again at verse 19 as the day of judgement dawns but the details of it are not announced: “Then God’s temple in heaven was opened, and the ark of his covenant was seen within his temple; and there were flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder, an earthquake and heavy hail.” And all I want to say about this verse is to draw your attention to the Ark of the Covenant within the Temple, which is a symbol of God’s presence with his people and the unbreakable covenant of his love that will never be destroyed and is eternal. So even in this picture of the dawning of the last day, there is a picture of encouragement for all believers that we are children of the covenant.

So we come to the end of this section, which is packed with teaching for us. During the last days, we have a task to do: to go out in the bittersweet ministry of mission. As we go, we are protected by God and we are assured that the time of tribulation is limited. We go out in the authority of God and the truth is that some of us will be persecuted but we go in the power of the Spirit and carry the light of Christ and no-one can cause us ultimate harm. We may face political oppression and opposition, we may be treated with disdain and covered in shame and the world may rejoice at our failures. But, ultimately, we will be raised and experience resurrection and taken up to the heavens with God where we will sit on thrones and rule with him. And we are sealed by the covenant love of God, which protects us from the horror of the final judgement. And that is surely a gospel worth proclaiming!

The end of Chapter 11 marks the halfway point for us and certainly, from next week, we will see a marked shift in the way Revelation unfolds. We have reached the end of the first three perspectives on the world cycle: Chapters 1-3, Chapters 4-8:1, Chapters 8:2-11:19. So next week, we go back to the beginning again and await the insights God has for us then…

A sermon on Acts 1:15-17, 21-26

This morning’s passage, from Acts 1, is a fascinating one because it gives us real insight into how the early church operated in the immediate aftermath of the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus. And I think there are some very important lessons for us in this passage about how we are called to be church together in Linton. So let’s follow the story on the pewsheet and then, when we’ve looked at the detail, we can draw out a number of points that will inform us about our community life together.

The event happens immediately after the Ascension of Christ, which we celebrated here at St. Mary’s on Thursday evening. And the disciples had left the Mount of Olives, presumably in complete shock, bewildered by the turn of events, and they had returned to Jerusalem.

And a couple of verses before the reading on the pewsheet , we are told that they went to an upstairs room together to pray. Sometimes, it is assumed that they went back to the upstairs room where they had shared the Last Supper with Jesus in order to feel close to him again. But I think that’s unlikely, because Luke uses two different Greek words for ‘upstairs room’ in his account of the Last Supper and this return to an upstairs room in Acts. And in this story from Acts, the type of room he speaks of is actually the prayer room and study of a rabbi - not a general room for eating in.

And it’s only a small point but I think there’s something interesting in that because, in the light of the shock they were feeling with the crisis events of their life, they sought sanctuary in the traditional religious structures; a rabbi’s prayer room. And I think that there is an important point for our ministry at St. Mary’s here; that there are many people in our community in Linton who, when they go through times of stress and crisis, will seek sanctuary in the comfort of the traditional church and we need to be ready to welcome them in at that point; asking nothing of them, but only providing hospitality for them in their time of need.

So the disciples pray together in the context of the familiar: a rabbi’s prayer room. And, after a while, they decide that it is time to go public again and see what God has in store for this community he has drawn together over the previous few years. So we read on the sheet, in verse 15: “In those days Peter stood up among the believers (together the crowd numbered about 120 people).

And, as we might expect, there is something significant in the fact that there were 120 people present because, in Jewish Law at that time, 120 men gathered together was the requisite number to form and formalise a new community with its own council and leadership structures. So there’s something very intentional about Peter’s actions here: he recognises the need for order and structure amongst the people of God and he waits until the time is right and then begins to formalise the community of the church.

And then he stands up to speak. Now, I don’t mind these pewsheets we use but they sometimes interpret the Scriptures poorly and this is a classic example of that. On the pewsheet, it says that Peter’s opening word is “Friends” but actually, the correct translation is “Brothers”. And I think this is a significant point because the word ‘Brothers’ conveys a significant truth to us; that if we are all brothers together we can only hold that relationship because we are children of the same Father. So the name ‘Brothers’ doesn’t speak of the relationship that we share so much as the wonderful truth that we are all children of the same heavenly Father. It is our relationship with God that binds us together as a church: and it is that which differentiates us from a social club or any other organisation and if we lose a sense of that, we will inevitably lose a sense of our purpose as a community.

“Brothers, it was necessary for the Scripture to be fulfilled as was told beforehand by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of David concerning Judas…” So what had David prophesied concerning this event?

Rather unhelpfully again, the reading sheet omits verses 18 and 19, which give us quotes from two of the Psalms of David. The first is Psalm 69:25, which issues a threat against those who oppose the will of God and betray him. The second is from Psalm 109:8, which suggests that, for those who have opposed God, “let someone else take over his office”. It is sometimes thought that Judas was replaced purely because he had died but that is not really the case. When the apostle James was martyred in Acts 12:2, he wasn’t replaced, so it was not about filling a vacancy caused by death that was important. Instead, Judas was replaced because he had fallen away from the ways of God and it was important that all the leaders were known for their faithfulness to the cause of Christ.

And so, in the light of that, Peter proposes a qualification for finding a new apostle in verses 21 and 22: “So one of the men who have accompanied us throughout the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day when he was taken from us – one of these must become a witness with us to his resurrection.”

The qualification was that the new apostle must have spent time with Jesus  and been a personal witness to his glory. When we think about the great heroes of the faith, we might think about those people whose names are written large in the history books: the Wesley brothers, Martin Luther, Mother Teresa, Charles Spurgeon, Richard Baxter and so on. People who had an extraordinary call on their lives and achieved extraordinary things. But if we thought a little more personally about that questions - who are the heroes of the faith to us - we may come up with a very different answer. For me, the heroes are those people who nurtured me in the faith when I was an arrogant and annoying teenager: local church people who never gave up on me. The heroes of the faith are some elderly people I have known in my life; people who have had a quiet faith but been faithful churchgoers, faithful lovers of Jesus for 40, 50, 60, 70 even 80 years, faithfully praying for the work of the local church. The heroes of the faith are some people I have known who have faced death fearlessly and with Christian dignity; a shining example of how to die well.

These, to me, are the true heroes of the faith. Ordinary people, living ordinary lives, doing ordinary things and yet, in their ordinariness, there was exhibited to me an extraordinary faith. And the reason for their extraordinary witness was because they had met with Jesus in the ordinariness of life and had found him in the mundane of daily living: they had spent time with Jesus and were witnesses to his glory. And this seems to me to be what lays behind the call of the replacement apostle: someone who had found the extraordinary God in the ordinary of life.

Two names were recommended: Matthias and Joseph called Barsabbas, also known as Justus. So the disciples prayed together: “Lord, you know everyone’s heart. Show us which one of these two you have chosen to take the place in this ministry and apostleship…” And, knowing the tradition of Scripture, we might have expected a calling on God to perform a supernatural miracle, to show everyone who the next Apostle to be chosen. Writing on the wall or a thunderstorm or a voice from heaven: anything like that would have done…

But what happens? This reading says: “They cast lots for them, and the lot fell on Matthias; and he was added to the eleven apostles”. How ordinary can you get? The apostles cast lots – a bit like flipping a coin - and that was that. We might have expected something more dramatic! But I think there is something for us to learn in the ordinariness of how Matthias was chosen.

Matthias was an ordinary man. We don’t hear anything extraordinary he ever did, before or after his call. Matthias was an ordinary man, chosen to be an apostle in a most ordinary way. Casting lots – a roll of the dice. An ordinary man, ordinary apostles, using an ordinary system of decision-making to bear witness to an extraordinary God.

And that, fundamentally, is what the church is all about. Here we are, ordinary people living in church community in an ordinary way. And yet, by doing so, we are bearing witness to the power of an extraordinary God. Because the qualification of discipleship, as we mentioned earlier is that we ordinary people spend time in the presence of an extraordinary God.

You and I have spent years living in the presence of God.

You and I have spent years knowing what it is to have Jesus as our Lord and Saviour.

You and I – ordinary people - know what it is to love and be loved by an extraordinary God.

And so the beautiful things about this story from Acts, the calling of Matthias, is that, actually, it is a story about our calling. Ordinary people being called by an extraordinary God. And that is why Paul was able to write in his letters that he could never boast in himself and his own achievements but that he could always boast in the awesome power of God. And so it is with us: we don’t boast in ourselves but we can boast in the extraordinary love and the extraordinary power of God whom we have had the privilege to call our Lord for so many years.

And the sacrament we will receive in a few minutes is, of course, the ultimate symbol of what we celebrate today; the ordinariness of bread and wine symbolising for us the extraordinary sacrificial love of God made manifest in the life and death of Jesus Christ. In the Eucharistic meal, we share the ordinary and the extraordinary come together in one moment, in one time, in one place. The bread and the wine. The body and blood of Christ. And so it is we celebrate our relationship with the living God, the extraordinary God, at work in the ordinariness of our lives.

So what do we learn from this passage as a church in Linton? To sum it all up, I think there are 5 points for us here:

1. St. Mary’s must be a safe place for those in crisis

Just as the disciples met together in the safety of the rabbi’s study, so we must work hard to create an environment at St. Mary’s where people will feel safe and at home during the most difficult times in their lives.

St. Mary’s is not my church.

St. Mary’s is not the PCC’s church.

St. Mary’s is not your church.

St. Mary’s is God’s church – and he welcomes in the hurting and the broken and our task is only to facilitate that.

2. St. Mary’s must be a community with a purpose

Just as Peter waited until there were 120 men present to form a community, so we are a community formed with a purpose, which is to worship God and tell others the Good News of Jesus. We have a Mission Action Plan to facilitate that work, that purpose, and we must continue to be intentional in unfolding the MAP.

3. St. Mary’s is under the authority of God the Father

We are not a social club, we are not a community organisation or a group that people join as if it were just another hobby. We are brothers and sisters together, sharing the same heavenly Father and we are under his authority in his church.

4. St. Mary’s must be a place where we share personal experiences of Jesus in our lives

We are witnesses to the gory of God in or lives. Each one of us has a story to share with others about how we have met with God in our lives. We must share those stories to encourage one another.

I wonder what we talk about over coffee at the end of the service? How much of our time is spent in general chit-chat and how much is spent sharing stories together about God at work in our lives? Perhaps we should spend more time asking one another to share stories rather than settling for a conversation that we could have anywhere else at any other time…

5. St. Mary’s must be a place where the extraordinary God is found in the ordinary of life

The miraculous is in our midst: an extraordinary God is at work in our ordinary lives and we should be seeking the hand of God in the simple things of life. The Word became Flesh: he didn’t become Superman or Spiderman! The Word became Flesh and we find the Word in the Flesh-ness of our everyday lives and we need to help one another find God in the ordinary.

So this passage from Acts seems innocuous enough: a little vignette to tide us over in the period between Ascension and Pentecost. But it is actually much more than that. Here we learn crucial lessons about what it means for us to be Church: basic lessons, fundamental lessons – but crucial all the same.

Our prayer is that as we continue to develop a church that is safe, that is purposeful, that is under the authority of the Father, that is a place of story-sharing, that is extraordinary in its ordinariness so God’s name will continue to be glorified. Amen.

A sermon on Revelation 10:1-11

So tonight, we explore this little chapter in Revelation that has a simple message expressed through some simple imagery. And what John is doing now is similar to what we saw before…

If you remember back to the previous viewing of the world-cycle we had, in chapter 6, the opening of six of the seven seals and then, just before the seventh seal was opened, John gave us an Intermission – which was Chapter 7. And in Chapter 7, John made a detour to reassure his hearers that their eternal destiny was secured in Christ: and then the seventh seal was opened and the Day of Judgement came. Well, exactly the same thing is happening here. In Chapters 8 and 9, we have been taken to the next viewing of the world-cycle and six of the seven trumpets have been blown and now, in Chapter 10, there is another Intermission whilst John gives a message to the Church and then, in Chapter 11, the seventh trumpet will be blown and the Day of Judgement will be pictured again

So this week’s Chapter is an Intermission with a Story: an Intermission with a Message for the Church. And what is that message? Well fundamentally, it addresses a new question in Revelation that hasn’t been asked explicitly before, even though it has been hinted at in Chapters 1-3 and the question is simply this: “What should the church be doing during these last days?” What is our task? What is our responsibility?

And, as we work through the text tonight, we are going to discover that this passage is deeply indebted to the Books of Daniel, Ezekiel and Jeremiah in the Old Testament for its ideas and symbols. So, let’s turn to the text and see what God has to say to us tonight…

Verse 1: “And I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven…”

The identity of this angel is not absolutely clear but there are some hints we can work with to hazard a guess…A few commentators think that this is a reference to Christ but I’m not convinced that this is an accurate idea for a couple of reasons.

First, the reference is to “another mighty angel…” and so this draws our mind back to the “mighty angel” in 5:2 who quite clearly is not Christ.

Second, the description of this angel is very similar to the description of the angel in Daniel 10:6. In Daniel 8 and 9, the angel who had guided Daniel was named as the angel Gabriel, so it is commonly agreed that the angel in Daniel 10 is Gabriel too. That being the case, it is likely that the angel being described in Revelation 10 is the Angel Gabriel.

So this angel, who may be Gabriel, comes down from heaven and what can we learn from his appearance?

First, he is “wrapped in a cloud”, which indicates that he is sent by God because, in Psalm 104:3, we read, “[God takes] the clouds as his chariot”.

Second, we read that he has “a rainbow over his head”, which reminds us of Chapter 4:3 and, if you can remember right back to when we looked at that verse, we considered the rainbow as being a symbol of God’s mercy and grace. That is a reference, of course, to Genesis 9:16, where God says, “Whenever the rainbow appears in the cloud, I shall see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and living creatures of every kind on earth.”

Third, John tells us, “his face was like the sun” and its because of this part of the description that some commentators take the angel to be Christ, because of the description of Jesus way back in 1:16 where it says, “his face was like the sun shining with full force”. But, as I say, I don’t think this necessarily identifies him as Christ so much as makes a comment on his holiness and purity.

Fourth, we are told that, “his legs were like pillars of fire”, which reminds us, of course, of Exodus 13:21: “And all the time the Lord went before them, by day a pillar of cloud to guide them on their journey, by night a pillar of fire to give them light.”

So here we have an angel of the Lord, probably Gabriel, sent from heaven to earth and he embodies for us the characteristics of God: he is sent by God, he embodies grace and mercy, he is holy and pure and he walks with the church in their troubles, just as God walked with the Israelites as they escaped from Egypt.

And so we come to this rather puzzling verse 2: “He held a little scroll open in his hand.” What does this mean?

Of course, it’s the second scroll that has been spoken of in Revelation but this is a different one, “a little scroll”. The other scroll, as you’ll remember, was in Chapter 5 and contained God’s plan for the world. But, as we shall come on to see, just because it is a “little scroll’, that doesn’t mean that it is somehow less important or that the message contained within it is less important.

What is important, of course, is that the scroll in 10:2 is “open” and the tense that is used indicates that it has been opened and will always stay open: there is a permanent message contained in that scroll that has importance beyond the immediate hearers for the church throughout all time.

And verse 2 continues, “[the angel] set his right foot on the sea and his left foot on the land” and of course that indicates the universal nature of his message; that it is for the whole church throughout the whole world. And, for the first hearers, this verse would have been such an encouragement too because it speaks of the cosmic nature of God’s authoritative word. There they were, in little huddles and congregations in Thyatira or Smyrna or Philadelphia, feeling weak and under threat and under resourced, being mocked by both Jew and Roman alike for their weak God who had succumbed to a criminal’s death on the cross but the reality is very different: here is a God who stands over the whole of creation, whose messengers have their feet planted in both sea and on land towering over the world with an open scroll.

The Christian God is not weak and impotent. He is sovereign and ruler over all creation.

And so we read in verse 3, this angel “gave a great shout, like a lion roaring”. This reminds us of two Old Testament passages: Firstly, Amos 3:8 which says, “The lion has roared; who is not frightened? The Lord God has spoken; who will not prophesy?” Secondly, Hosea 11:10: “They will follow the Lord who roars like a lion, and when he roars, his sons will speed out of the west.”

And back to verse 3 again, “And when he shouted, the seven thunders sounded.” Now this produces an interesting aside for us because if you read commentaries from quite a few years back on Revelation, the assumption is made that part of John’s original letter is missing: there are seven seals recorded, seven trumpets recorded, seven bowls of wrath recorded but there is no mention elsewhere of seven thunders so this must be a part of the original letter that has got lost. But I’m not convinced about that and most modern Biblical scholarship doesn’t accept that view, either. Instead, it is now understood to be a reference to Psalm 29, which lists the effects of the seven thunders of God.

So, in its totality, verse 3 seems to be drawing us back to the power and sovereignty of God: he is like a lion that roars, a deity who thunders.

And the sovereign, powerful Lord communicated a message to John and, we read in verse 4, he was just about to write the message down when God says to him, “Seal up what the seven thunders have said, and do not write it down.” Interestingly, only in the book of Revelation do we find this word, ‘Seal up’ in the whole of the New Testament: it is used here and again in Revelation 22:10. But in Chapter 10, John is told to “seal up” the words from God and in Chapter 22, he is told “not to seal up” the prophecy! The only other biblical instance of this idea comes in Daniel 12:4, where God says, “But you, Daniel, keep the words secret and seal the book until the time of the end.” It is a strange idea: why would God say something to John in a vision and then tell him not to reveal it? It’s not the only time in the New Testament we come across this idea: in 2 Corinthians 12:4, Paul says, “[I] was caught up into paradise, and heard words so secret that human lips may not repeat them.”

I think what is important here, is that these verses keep us humble: not everything is revealed to us. We do not have complete access to God’s plans and so we cannot be arrogant in our faith or our ideas for the future. Quite rightly, some things have remained hidden from us and God will either reveal them to those he chooses or he will choose not to reveal them at all: such is the sovereignty of God and we, as mere human beings, have no right to question that.

Verses 5 and 6: “Then the angel whom I saw standing on the sea and on the land raised his right hand to heaven and swore by him who lives for ever and ever, who created heaven and what is in it, the earth and what is in it, and the sea and what is in it.”

The raising of the right hand, of course is a gesture made when swearing an oath. We still do that today in a court of law – or at the Leveson Enquiry! - and it goes right back to at least the time of Deuteronomy 32:40: “I raise my hand towards heaven and I swear…” And the seriousness of the oath that is about to be taken is evident in the description of God in these verses: there is something powerful about this description and, again, the sovereignty of God and his awesome power over all creation are made explicit.

And just as importantly, I think the solemnity and measured nature of this description tells us something about the solemnity and measured nature of God’s judgement: there is no panic attached to it, it isn’t a knee-jerk reaction against sin. Crucially, it isn’t Plan B because things have not worked out well. Here is the sovereign Lord of all heaven and all earth and he isn’t a God who just reacts to the dire nature of the fallen world: he is sovereign, he is Lord, he is in control…

And what is the oath that is sworn by the angel? Verse 7: “There will be no more delay, but in the days when the seventh angel is to blow his trumpet, the mystery of God will be fulfilled, as he announced to his servants the prophets.” This must have been a real moment of excitement for those under the altar in an earlier chapter, who had cried out, “How long, O Lord? When will our blood be avenged?” Here is the answer: “There will be no more delay…”

Let’s just unpack the rest of this verse, because it is a complex one…

“There will be no more delay, but in the days when the seventh angel is to blow his trumpet…” The word ‘but’ means, ‘on the contrary’: “There will be no more delay. On the contrary…”

However, we are still not in a position to work out the date of when this will happen because then the angel goes back into an ambiguous description and, if you are interested in the technicalities of this verse, the tense used is the Present Active Subjunctive, which expresses possibility rather than actuality: So how this verse really reads is, “There will be no more delay. On the contrary, whenever the seventh angel might blow his trumpet…”

Do you see? There is still an ambiguity about when this might happen. “Whenever the seventh angel might blow his trumpet…”; so we can’t spend time trying to work out when this will actually happen in the light of the phrase: “There will be no more delay” because that phrase is immediately qualified by the angel. It’s going to happen – but we don’t know when…

And what is going to happen whenever the seventh angel might blow his trumpet? Verse 7 again: “the mystery of God will be fulfilled…” What on earth does that mean? Well, the way we use the word ‘mystery’ today indicates something we can’t understand. But in biblical times, the word ‘mystery’ meant something that was currently not understood but would be revealed. And that which is about to be revealed, of course, is the completion of God’s plan for his creation through the judgement on sin and death and the redemption of his people.

And we shouldn’t be surprised, of course, because as John reminds us, this plan had been revealed to the prophets from long ago: not that we should think of this just as the Old Testament prophets but all those who have spoken out the redemptive plan of God throughout history. As we read in Amos 3:7: “Indeed, the Lord God does nothing without revealing his plan to his servants the prophets.” This, of course, being the verse John was thinking about, when he wrote this part of his vision down.

And so we come to verse 8 in which the voice from heaven, presumably that of Christ, says to John, “Go, take the scroll that is open in the hand of the angel who is standing on the sea and on the land.” John has heard one message from the thunders of God and been refused the right to publish that message but now he is being given another message that he can take to the church. And this part of Chapter 10 would immediately have reminded John’s hearers of Ezekiel 2:8-9, where God says to the prophet: “’You must speak my words to them, whether they listen or whether in their rebelliousness they refuse to listen. But you, O man, must heed what I say and not be rebellious like them. Open your mouth and eat what I am giving you.’” I saw a hand stretched out before me, holding a scroll…then God said, ‘Eat what is in front of you; eat this scroll, then go and speak to the Israelites.’” And that’s exactly what happens here in Revelation 10:9: “So I went to the angel and told him to give me the little scroll; and he said to me, ‘Take it, and eat; it will be bitter to your stomach, but sweet as honey in your mouth.’”

And I suppose that what is meant here by John eating the scroll is that he is to make the message his own: by ingesting it and digesting it, the message on the scroll becomes part of him, it enters his innermost being.

So John eats the scroll, just like Ezekiel did, but the effect of bitterness and sweetness goes beyond the experience of Ezekiel but it is not dissimilar to that recorded by Jeremiah in 15:16,18: “When I came on your words I devoured them; they were joy and happiness to me…why, then, is my pain unending, and my wound desperate, past all healing?””

And, of course, here we come to the crux of the matter: John is given the Gospel to proclaim and the experience of Gospel proclamation is both bitter and sweet. We are not called to just proclaim a nice message of a cuddly God who loves us, a sort of picture-card-Jesus who is always warm and accepting. We are called to proclaim a realistic Gospel that speaks of both salvation and judgement and the reality is that this can be a bitter experience because there is a bitterness inherent in the Gospel for those who are not saved.

And that is true not just for the world – but for the Church too. We have seen already, especially in Chapters 1-3, that the Church must grapple with both joy and pain in its daily living. We are a Church that lives in the shadow of both the cross and the empty tomb: if we are to live, first we must die; to be raised with Christ, we must first be crucified with him.

So this idea of bitterness and sweetness speaks of the reality of the Gospel, both for the world and for the church.

And so we come to the final verse in this chapter, verse 11 in which we find the true meaning of the little scroll that is given to John: “You must prophesy again about many peoples and nations and languages and kings.” John was being given a huge responsibility; a great burden to carry: to prophesy the reality of the Gospel to the nations in the last days, and that is a task in which we all share.

We started tonight by reflecting on the question: “What is the role of the church in the last days?” The answer is given in verse 11: “Prophesy”.

That is our task.

That is our calling.

And it will be both bitter and sweet.

But, as we undertake the task before us, we must remember the rest of this chapter; that reminded us of the guiding presence of God: the God who is sovereign over all creation, the God who comes with the rainbow of grace and compassion and leads us as he led the Israelites in the desert. In Matthew 28, Jesus said, “I am with you always, until the end of the age” and it is crucial that we hold onto that truth as we undertake the bittersweet task of mission in these last days.

And, as Paul says in Romans 8: “If God is for us, who can be against us? We are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”

A sermon on Revelation 9:1-21

Wow! This is quite some passage of Scripture, isn’t it? When people say they don’t understand the Book of Revelation and find its imagery scary, this is the type of passage they are referring to. I’m not going to say that we are now getting into the meat of the book because you will have gathered by now that each and every verse is meaty enough! But there is a definite change in emphasis and style from hereon in that means we have to grapple hard with the imagery if we want to stay focused on the intent of the book, which is primarily, as I said at the beginning, grace, compassion, mercy and encouragement in the face of trials. So…before we get into the text itself, let’s just remind ourselves of the context of this chapter.

We are now into the third of the world-cycle perspectives: the first was the Letters to the Churches, chapters 1-3, the second was the worship of heaven and the opening of the seals, chapters 4-8:1, and now we are viewing the same world perspective again but this time with the blowing of the trumpets. The first three trumpets brought to mind warnings of judgement that are worked out through the natural world: ecological chaos that threaten the created order. And we were reminded that as we pray, ‘Your kingdom come…’ we are ushering in judgement as well as salvation and we need to take responsibility for that.

And tonight, we are looking in detail at the next two trumpets to be blown and we have to say that the symbolism and imagery is quite scary and not easy to understand. However, once we get into the text, we will see – as we always do - that, actually, there is nothing to be frightened of at all because John is making a quite simple point in language that would have been culturally understandable to the first hearers. So, let’s relax into this text and see what God has to say to us through it…

Verse 1: “And the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star that had fallen from heaven to earth, and he was given the key to the shaft of the bottomless pit.”

Clearly, this ‘star’ is a metaphor – not a literal star - because we read, “He was given…” and that would not make sense for a literal star. And there are so many interpretations as to who is indicated by this star that we cannot afford to dogmatically state who we think it is. But we can dispel a few myths surrounding this verse. First, we cannot infer from this verse that it is a ‘fallen angel’. The word used here for ‘to fall’ is also used to say ‘descend’, so there is no theological basis for thinking of this as a fallen angel in the sense of an angel who has fallen away from God. The verse just refers to a being that descends.

We have already seen in Revelation that angels are referred to as ‘stars’. For example in 1:20 we read that, “the seven stars are the seven angels of the churches” but, in that instance, we weren’t thinking about spiritual angels so much as the messengers to the churches or the church elders. So it’s possible that this star in Revelation 9 is a spiritual angel or maybe a human leader. Some commentators, not without good reason, think that this star is Jesus; the Morning Star who descended from heaven to earth to engage in spiritual warfare against Satan. On the other hand, some commentators think that this star is Satan, who fell from heaven and wages war against Jesus. We need to be honest with ourselves and admit that the identity of this star is just not clear to us: it could be Jesus, it could be Satan, it could be a human, it could be a spiritual being.

But, actually, the identity isn’t that important because it’s not the focus of this verse. What is important to note is that the star “was given the key” and so what John wants us to understand is that, in all that follows, God is still sovereign, he is still in control because it is he who gives the key. God’s sovereignty and power is the focus here and we mustn’t lose sight of that, else we will give in to fear…

So the star is under the authority of God and opens the shaft of the abyss. The abyss is not a common metaphor in the Bible but when it is used it seems to be an idea that, in the Old Testament and New Testament denotes chaos and the place or existence of all that stands against God. There are allusions to the abyss in Psalms and Isaiah and Amos. And, in Luke 8:31, when Jesus casts the spirits out of the Gaderene swine, they beg him not to send them back into the abyss. Paul only uses the word once, in Romans 10:7 –  “Who will descend into the abyss?” and, for Paul, it is a place of the dead.

So here in Revelation 9, the abyss, the place of all that stands against God and life is opened at the will of God by the star and we then have described for us what comes from the abyss…

Now, as we come to look at the meaning of 9:2-12, we’ve got two ways of doing this. We can either work through verse by verse, examining the details of the symbolism and probably not get very far until we have finally worked out the identity of the locusts. Or we can have a working hypothesis as to who the locusts are and then interpret the detail from there. And it seems to me that the second of these is the better way of approaching this passage, otherwise we might end up with some very weird and wacky interpretations, which wouldn’t be very helpful at all…So, if it’s OK with you, I want to start this section at verse 11 and then work through verses 2-10 in the light of that because I think that in verse 11, John gives a really interesting word-play that reveals for us who these locusts are.

Verse 11: “They [the locusts] have as king over them the angel of the bottomless pit; his name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek he is called Appolyon.” These are not natural locusts – they have a king and this is in clear contrast to Proverbs 30:27, which simply says, “The locusts have no king…” And the king – who is the angel of the abyss – therefore rules over all that stands against the true God and stands against life in God. John gives this king a name: Abaddon. In Hebrew, this means ‘Destruction’ and in Job 28:22, Abbadon and Death go hand in hand. So, this is a king who is opposed to God and those who live in him, a king who brings destruction, a king who brings death. Perhaps you are beginning to work out the identity of the locust king already…

And then John makes the identity clear through a very clever word-play in verse 11: “His name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek he is called Appolyon.” Now John knows full well that the Greek translation of Abaddon is not Appolyon! The Greek translation of Abaddon is ‘apoleia’: he even uses the word himself in Revelation 17:8. Instead of using the word ‘apoleia’, he says ‘Appolyon’ and the name ‘Appolyon’ derives from the name of the god Apollo. Now, here’s the thing…The worshippers of Apollo used as one of their key symbols – the locust. And who do you think believed himself to be an incarnation of Apollo? Domitian!

Domitian believed that he was Apollo incarnate on earth, so the king of the locusts that John refers to here – is Domitian. And the locusts are those pesky Romans again!

Now we don’t have to be fearful of this passage, because we realise that what is being written about here is actually little or no different from what we came across in Chapters 2 and 3 of Revelation. The blowing of the first four trumpets showed ecological disaster. The blowing of this fifth trumpet shows ungodly domination and oppression by political authorities, symbolised as a plague of locusts coming to devour.

So now we are in a position to go back to verse 2 and work through the symbolism without any fear but with deeper understanding of what we are looking at.

Verse 2: “He opened the shaft of the bottomless pit, and from the shaft rose smoke like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened with the some from the shaft.” That which comes from the pit, from the place that opposes God is toxic. The air becomes darkened when the abyss is opened and we know from Ephesians 2:2 that the air was thought to be the place where demons lived: Paul had written in Ephesians, “You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient.”

And it is from this darkened, toxic, ungodly air that the locusts come, verse 3: “Then from the smoke came locusts on the earth, and they were given authority like the authority of scorpions of the earth.” Again we notice here, as we did in verse 1, that the locusts are given authority in the same way that the star was given the key: they have no authority in and of themselves and so the Roman power had no authority in and of itself because, ultimately, it was under the authority of God.

And the authority of this locust army was like that of the scorpions of earth. Wherever scorpions are mentioned in the Old Testament, in 1 Kings and 2 Chronicles for example, they are metaphorical scorpions used to scourge and persecute and hurt. And so the locust army from the abyss is released and will scourge the world with its domination and oppressive rule.

Now verse 4 is crucial for us to realise that what is not being described here is persecution of the church but a more general ungodliness of rule by oppressive political authorities. “They were told not to damage the grass of the earth or any green growth or any tree, but only those people who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads.” This is an interesting twist, of course, because ordinary locusts harm vegetation but not people but these demonic locusts harm people but not vegetation. The first four trumpets dealt with ecological chaos and the meaning of this trumpet is around how oppressive political regimes wreak havoc on societies. And there is an irony here that the locusts of the abyss, which is all that is antichrist only attack their own…

We have read enough of John’s writings now to know that he never exempts Christians from the sufferings of the world and I don’t think that’s what he is saying here, either. But I think he is making the point that Christians cannot ultimately be hurt if they are sealed by God for salvation. Don’t forget that Chapters 8 and 9, the blowing of the trumpets was preceded by Chapter 7, which gave hope to all believers that our future is ultimately secured in the sealing we receive from God. Those who do not own Christ – and are not owned by him – have no such security and the locust army attack them mercilessly.

And the attack is outlined in verse 5: “They [the locusts] were allowed to torture them for five months, but not to kill them, and their torture was like the torture of a scorpion when it stings someone.” I think the time-span of the locust infestation is interesting because locust attacks normally only last for a few days before they move on but in this case, the attack lasts five months, which is the whole life-span of a locust. It seems to me that what John is saying is that the whole existence of the locust army is focussed on oppression and harm.

And the impact of oppressive political regimes is heartbreaking as verse 6 reminds us: “And in those days people will seek death but will not find it; they will long to die but death will flee from them.” When we look at oppressive regimes around the world today; Syria, Burma, Zimbabwe, our hearts break at the suffering the people endure such that they think they would be better off dead than continuing to live under such cruelty.

And so in verses 7-10, we have a description of these locusts: these political authorities who oppress with such great cruelty. I don’t think we need to labour each metaphor, searching for meaning but the general characteristics are laid out before us through the similes.

Verse 7: “In appearance the locusts were like horses equipped for battle” and certainly there is a large degree of violence that goes hand in hand with oppression.

“On their heads were what looked like crowns of gold” but notice the crowns are pretend, they are not real, and so is the supposed power and authority of oppression.

“Their faces were like human faces” and I think this refers to the way in which oppressive rulers often masquerade as rational, even compassionate people. And I’m thinking at the this present time of President Assad of Syria with his calm exterior, sharp suits, reasonable voice and beautiful wife: who would think he was the author of such evil and wickedness?

Verse 8: “Their hair like women’s hair, and their teeth like lions’ teeth”; again the paradox of beauty and ferocity co-existing in one ruler or one regime.

Verse 9: “They had scales like iron breastplates”, which seems to be a reference to body armour and so it is that oppressive regimes seem almost impenetrable and almost impossible to overthrow.

“And the noise of their wings was like the noise of many chariots with horses running into battle”, a reference perhaps to the words of violence and threat that they utter so regularly.

Verse 10: “They have tails like scorpions, with stingers, and in their tails is their power to harm people for five months.” We’ve considered the analogy a few minutes ago of their scourging and violence, which seems to be what consumes them and their desire to rule.

So that’s quite a detailed description of the fifth trumpet but it’s important that we get a handle on this because it is certainly one of those passages in Revelation that causes so much fear and misunderstanding. But, as we’ve come to expect from John, he is speaking very practically to his first hearers with symbols they would understand. They would certainly know what it was to live under a cruel and oppressive regime and many of our brothers and sisters around the world do so today and we need to pray for them and do what we can to crush the locust regimes that cause so much harm and pain to so many…

So as verse 12 reminds us, there are still two woes to come and we will look at the next woe now, verses 13-21.

This feels to me to be a very confused and chaotic part of John’s vision but maybe that’s because it is describing that which is confusing and chaotic in nature. My understanding is that if the fifth trumpet was describing oppressive political regimes then this sixth trumpet is describing the ravages of war. Not any specific war in particular, of course, but all wars throughout history and especially those that we endure in these last days.

So, in verse 13 the angel blows his trumpet and John then writes, “I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar before God…” I think what John is doing here is bringing us back to the same point that we thought about last week. The prayers of the martyrs were offered on the altar in 6:9. The prayers of all believers were laid on the altar in 8:3 and so we are being reminded that the judgements that are being outpoured are in response to the prayers of the people, “Your kingdom come…”

And the voice says to the angel, verse 14: “Release the four angels who are bound at the great river Euphrates.” OK, just a few thinks to say about this verse.

First, there’s no reason to think that these are the same four angels who we thought about in 7:1 because the purpose of each is very different.

Secondly, I think there is something malign and evil about these four angels in verse 14, not just because they unleash horrific wars on the world, but also because they have been bound which is to suggest that God has limited them and restricted their activities until he is ready to have them released.

Thirdly, why are they bound at the Euphrates? Well, this was the Eastern boundary of the Roman Empire and the Romans viewed the Euphrates with fear, because their enemies lay beyond but the Jews viewed it with hope, because potential deliverers lay beyond! I think I’ve mentioned the Parthians before who defeated the Romans in skirmishes along the Euphrates in 53 BC and again in AD 62 and the importance of the Parthians will become clear in a minute. But they are a good example of the Roman fear of Beyond-the-Euphrates and the Jewish hope of Beyond-the-Euphrates. We will come across the Euphrates as a symbol in a few weeks time, so we can go into more detail then…

And then we come to this crucial verse 15, which again stresses for us the sovereignty and authority of God: “So the four angels were released, who had been held ready for the hour and day and month and year, to kill a third of humankind.” Two things to say here about the authority of God.

The first is that the release of the angels is tied to a specific, pre-ordained moment. This is God’s timing, he is in control. Again, we come back to what we thought about in previous weeks, that it is not saying God is the author of war and all that is evil but that, through the consequence of war, God can visit judgement, which is a very different concept altogether: he uses moments of evil to defeat evil, just as he did with Christ’s death on the cross.

And secondly, we notice that, again, only a third are killed: a sizeable minority, but a limited amount. Even in this chaotic moment, God is still sovereign and still Lord of all.

In verse 16, we read that the “number of the troops of cavalry was two hundred million” and then John adds this curious phrase, “I heard their number”. There is something important about the number of troops, otherwise John wouldn’t have said, “I heard their number”; he would have said, like he did in 5:11, myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands. I don’t really understand this verse, to be honest because the only other two times when this number of 200 million is mentioned is both with regard to the strength of God’s power. In Psalm 68:17, that’s the number of chariots God has when he rides from Sinai. And in Daniel 7:10, it is the number of angels who serve him. So why these antichrist forces match God’s power, I don’t know: I rather wish John had given them a slightly lower number, say, 199 million - and then I could preach about how God’s strength is greater than that of antichrist: but he didn’t, and so I can’t…

Verse 17, I just want to make one small comment, by way of detour…John says, “And this is how I saw the horses in my vision…” It’s only a small detail – but I want us to hold on to this - that it is only a vision: these are not literal creatures, they are symbols and so we don’t need to fear ever seeing these things: not in their actuality, anyway…

And so, as John did with the locusts, he now gives a vivid description of the horses and riders. And it’s interesting that John starts this verse by saying, “This is how I saw the horses…” and then immediately he says, “The riders wore…To John, the riders and the horses are one and the same: together they are a mighty war machine and this fits in with the picture of Parthian warriors of the period, who came from over the Euphrates, and both rider and horse would wear brightly coloured body armour. So even this rather frightening image is something the first hearers would have understood.

It certainly seems as if it is something akin to Parthian warriors he is describing here, right down to the detail in verse 19 where he writes, “their tails were like serpents” because the Parthian horsemen twisted the tails of their horses to give them the appearance of snakes. And, again, it was a Parthian skill to shoot arrows backwards as they rode past the enemy. So perhaps that fits in with the allusion at the end of verse 19: “with [their tails] they inflicted harm.”

And finally, we come to verses 20 and 21. All this tribulation befell the people of earth but still they did not repent. We are reminded again, like last week, of the plagues in Egypt, that didn’t even soften the heart of Pharaoh. Just like the Egyptians back then, the sounding the trumpets does not seem to make any impact on the understanding of so many…John says, “They did not repent of the work of their hands or give up worshiping demons and idols of gold and silver and bronze and stone and wood…and they did not repent of their murders or their sorceries or their fornication or their thefts.”

A few weeks ago, we thought about the six seals that were broken open: warnings from God through cataclysmic events and people did not repent and so the seventh seal is opened: the Day of Judgement. And that is exactly what is mirrored here: the six trumpets have been sounded, warnings from God through cataclysmic events and people do not repent and so it remains only for the seventh trumpet to be sounded and we can guess what that will be but we will have to wait a few weeks before we get to that moment…

So Revelation 9 is a complex and frightening passage of Scripture unless we seek to understand it in its historical and cultural context. These two trumpets are describing to us the warnings from God that come through oppressive political regimes and the tumult of war. That is not to say that God is the author of either of these things but that he uses the fallen nature of humanity for his own purposes.

Even in the midst of the horror of oppression and war, there is to be found the limiting sovereignty of God, his grace and mercy and an opportunity for repentance.

I think, in response to this passage, we do well to ensure our own security as being sealed by God. But there is also a responsibility to engage with issues of social justice: speaking out against oppression wherever we find it and naming it for the evil that it is and doing all we can to prevent the horror of war; engaging our MPs and political and church leaders to speak out against it as ultimately demonic.

We cannot just sit here and say, “Oh well, these are signs of the times”. When we pray, “Your kingdom come”, we need to be agents for the ushering in of his kingdom. We need to unmask the powers for what they are, we need to alert others to the evil of war and oppression and do all we can to stand firm for God in these dark days.

We must not think of compassion as a noun but as a verb.

In Joshua 24:15, we are given a stark choice: “If serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”

Who will you serve?

A sermon on Exodus 17:8-16 - Praying in times of crisis

It’s always a real challenge to preach a sermon on prayer because for me, on a personal level, prayer is such a struggle. And when I preach on prayer, one of the things I want to avoid is to draw examples from the spiritual giants in prayer: the likes of John Wesley and Hudson Taylor and Smith Wigglesworth, whose lives were devoted to prayer and God did great things through them. Because if you’re anything like me, you hear about those people in sermons and end up more depressed than before. I know I could never match John Wesley and get up at 4.00 in the morning to pray. I am no rival to Paul Yonggi Cho in South Korea, who spends 6 hours a day in prayer. I admire these guys – but I don’t have their perseverance in prayer.

And perhaps it seems silly, but I don’t want to hear about these great prayer warriors so much as the weak and frail and vulnerable pray-ers who struggle to remain faithful: and yet God still uses them and hears them and answers their prayers and gives them great victories. Perhaps we are all weak in our prayers but God still loves us and still honours us when we pray and he will bless our efforts.

And this passage from Exodus 17 gives us real encouragement. It’s an amazing story about how Moses dealt with the problem of the Amalekites who came to attack the people of Israel.

Now if you’ve ever read these parts of the Old Testament, you will know that battles and wars were not uncommon amongst the nations and tribal people: Israel was pretty well used to physical attack from others. But the Amalekites were a different kettle of fish all together. The Amalekites were vicious beyond all words. They were tough and they were brutal. The Amalekites were nomads, living out in the desert regions and the way they survived was to attack neighbouring people and kill them and take their possessions and cattle and anything of worth.

And so one day, they looked around them, and they saw the Israelites and they thought their luck was in: easy pickings, no problems here; one attack and Israel would be history. And so, completely unprovoked, without any warning, as we read in verse 8: “The Amalekites came and attacked the Israelites at Rephidim”. The Israelites probably didn’t know what had hit them.

And, actually, life can be like that for all of us: every now and again, without any warning at all, when it seems to be all clear sailing, life throws up a major battle for us. Maybe someone we lobe becomes ill and dies. Maybe we are made unemployed. Perhaps we contract an illness – or our marriage hits the rocks. It happens, doesn’t it? Without any warning at all, our lives become blighted by a major catastrophe the size and might of the Amalekites. And we are left reeling in shock and distress and we look at the problem that faces us and we think: “How on earth am I ever going to cope with this one?”

And we are tempted to think, “If I was a spiritual giant like Wesley or Hudson Taylor, I’d be OK – I could pray my way out of this one…” But I’m not Wesley. I’m not Hudson Taylor. I’m just me: frail, vulnerable, fragile me: tattered and torn at the edges, not knowing which way to turn.

Well, I guess that’s how Moses felt too. But the way he handled the situation and the example he leaves us here gives us some direction on how to cope prayerfully with the crises we face in our lives today. And there’s three points I want to pick up from this passage:

And the first is this: 

Perspective

Moses put his crisis into perspective. Have you ever tried one of those Magic Eye puzzles that look like a mass of coloured dots and you need to see them in a particular way to see the pattern emerging? But to see the pattern, you need to adjust the way you look at the puzzle. You have to look at the picture a certain way to see the pattern emerging. And that is true of the crises we face in life too.

Maybe you are facing a particularly tough situation at the moment and you are trying to find a way to deal with it but when you look at it, it seems just a big mess, utter confusion. But if we want to see the real issue at hand in our lives, if we want to deal with our crises prayerfully, we need to do two things.

First, we need to make some practical planning. In verse 9, Moses says to Joshua: “Pick out some men to go and fight the Amalekites tomorrow”. Now that seems to me an eminently sensible thing to do. The Amalekites are out there, ready to attack, so the logical thing to do is to prepare an army to defend. And so Moses takes Joshua to one side: not just any old military leader. Joshua was the best man for the job, the top military leader in Israel. And Moses tells him to make plans to sort the situation out.

Now there is a school of thought amongst some Christians that is scathing about making plans for the future. I have come across it many times in life, not least when those I loved dearest were suffering from a terminal illness and some Christians would say, “Don’t worry about doctors: Just pray. God will bring healing.”

Let me tell you what I think. If you are in a crisis at the moment, the lack of making proper plans is not a sign of godliness: it’s a sign of ignorance and stupidity. If your marriage is hitting a tough spot: you need to do something positive about the situation. If you are ill or someone you love is ill: you need to see a doctor. The Bible does not condone lack of practical activity as a sign of godliness.

We are all called to take some degree of responsibility for our lives and that is exactly what Moses did when he was faced with an Amalekite attack. He didn’t sit around waiting for a thunderbolt from heaven to wipe out the Amalekites: he sorted out his leaders, he sorted out his strategy, he sorted out his troops and he got them ready for a counter-attack.

But that’s only half the story, of course because then we go on to read the rest of Moses’ words: “I will stand on top of the hill holding the stick that God told me to carry”. Now this is where Moses and I have something in common. If I looked out over the desert and saw the Amalekites there, I too would have volunteered to get out the way and go and stand on a nearby hill. But the difference is that I am a coward and Moses was a man of action.

You see, Moses knew that when facing the might and strength of the Amalekites, practical planning just wasn’t enough…And when we face our crises in life too, practical planning just isn’t enough…

We need to back our activity up with some serious prayer: Moses knew that Joshua was the military man and that he was the prayer man. So he goes off to pray whilst the battle commences.

But there’s something very important to notice here: that when Moses prays, he doesn’t do it from the front line but backs off some distance and goes up a hill to pray. And this is where perspective comes into things. Because if we want to pray for a solution to the problems we face, we need to be prepared to back off a bit, to try to distance ourselves a bit so that we can get a proper perspective. The secret to praying for a solution to a particular crisis in life, I think, is having the ability to stand back from the problem so that we can see things a bit more clearly.

Standing on the front line with the troops is not the best place to pray for the battle. Standing on a hill, some distance away, where you can see the whole game-plan is a much better way to pray. It’s a tough call but we need to find a little bit of space each day to distance ourselves from our problems so we can hear God’s voice more clearly.

Praying in times of crisis is all about Perspective: practical planning, yes, but matched with a bit of distance, away from the tumult of battle so we can hear the still, small voice of God a bit more clearly.

So much for Perspective. The second example Moses gives us here is that he experiences real Power when he prays. 

Power

Verse 11: “As long as Moses held up his arms, the Israelites won, but whn he put his arms down, the Amalekites started winning.” The truth is – there is real power in prayer: it’s not some fairly-tale, it’s not make-believe, it’s not fate, or luck or co-incidence. When we pray, things happen: people are healed, situations are altered, churches grow, grief is dealt with, spiritual battles are won.

Prayer is real. Prayer is powerful. Prayer works.

But for some mysterious reason that I can’t explain, the other side of the coin is true as well. When we cease praying, we inhibit the power of God at work in our lives. But, as I said at the beginning, the beauty of this story is that it shows Moses not as a prayer warrior but, like us, as a frail, vulnerable and weak human being. Moses got tired – and his arms dropped - but God could handle that and what solution did God provide? Two wonderful companions – Aaron and Hur – to help him along. Verse 12: “When Moses arms grew tired, Aaron and Hur brought a stone for him to sit on, while they stood beside him and held up his arms, holding them steady until the sun went down.”

To be honest with you, there are many times when my arms drop in prayer. And I cannot tell you how much I value the ministry of other Christians being Aaron and Hur for me: sitting me down and encouraging me to go on praying and go on walking with God when all I want to do, sometimes, is give up. And I know that some of you carry burdens far greater than mine but let me tell you two things:

First, if you bring those burdens to God, he will lighten your load and give you the strength you need to carry on. Jesus loves each one of us so much. He longs for us to turn to him in prayer for help and he will never let us down.

Secondly, whatever cares and worries you are carrying today, this church is full of Aarons and Hurs who will help you carry the load. If we share our problems with each other, we will be sure to find support and strength from other people who will love you and accept you just as you are.

We must not despise the love and acceptance which is on offer today from God and from each other.

So then, in praying for strength in times of crisis, we need to get a right perspective: planning for all eventualities, backed up with serious prayer and we need to understand the power of prayer and the power of a community of Aarons and Hurs who will stand with us.

And finally, my third point, which we don’t have much time to unpack now, is the response of praise when we see our prayers answered. 

Praise

Verse 13: “In this way, Joshua totally defeated the Amalekites”: not a temporary setback but total defeat. And what does God tell Moses to do after this? Verse 14: “Write an account of this victory, so that it will be remembered.”

When God answers our prayers, we need to remember his goodness to us. And what is important about living in community together is sharing our experiences of God answering prayers so that we can encourage one another with the victories that God has won in our lives. If God is answering your prayers, share the news with one another then, in our darkest hours, we can all remember and be encouraged. And that encouragement will lead us to praise God, which is the only appropriate response to answered prayer. Verse 15: “Moses built an altar and named it, ‘The Lord is my Banner!’” Answered prayer results in praise and praise builds the Kingdom of God.

So we are out of time – but the lessons from this passage are clear: Moses and the Israelites were facing an enormous crisis, bigger than anything they had faced before, and their prayerful response claimed the victory God had for them.

Perspective.

Power.

Praise.

And the same is true for us today.

What burdens do you carry tonight? What is the emotional baggage that weighs you down? Follow the example of Moses: put the problem into perspective, experience the power of God, praise God for his goodness. That is the way for us to live out our lives as new creations is God.

We need to rest in the promise that God has for us, whatever our personal situation, whatever Amalekite-sized problem we face. Moses’ final words in this passage, in verse 16, says it all: “The Lord will continue to fight against the Amalekites for ever!” That is God’s promise to each one of us tonight.

A sermon on Revelation 8:1-13

Last week, John took us on a slight detour as he gave us this comforting picture of the 144,000 and the Great Multitude. If you remember from earlier weeks, when we looked at Chapters 5 and 6, the seals were being opened which were the judgements of God on the earth and there had been six of the seven seals opened and, just before we came to the seventh seal, John takes us back into heaven to see the 144,000 and the Great Multitude; to reflect on the fact that those who are sealed by God to salvation have nothing to fear from the final judgement. And having given us this reassurance, he is now ready to describe to us the opening of the seventh seal, which is the final judgement of God on his fallen creation.

We begin in Chapter 8:1 with this very puzzling statement: “When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.” This is an interesting idea: why was there silence for half an hour?

Some commentators have taken this to mean that there is a pause in heaven as the angels and archangels are taken back in awe at what is about to happen in the final judgement: that this is a pause, if you like, of awe and wonder as the whole of heaven awaits the events to come. Others have been a bit more creative – and more interesting – in suggesting that the silence is a return to the original silence before the creation of the world in anticipation of the new creation after the final judgement. I’m not persuaded by this argument – but I like it…It’s based on a Jewish apocalyptic book called 2 Esdras, which says that, when the Messianic era comes to end, “the world shall be turned back to primeval silence for seven days, as it was at the first beginnings, so that no one shall yet be left. And after seven days the world, which is not yet awake, shall be roused, and that which is corruptible shall perish.”

I’m not sure that either of these are particularly useful interpretations, though, because the first 5 verses of this chapter are clearly related to the notion of prayer so I think we need to look for an interpretation that links silence and prayer. And we find this link in Judaism when we look a set of writings in the Talmud called Hagigah. In this book, there is an examination of the seven heavens and the fifth is hallmarked by, “companies of ministering angels, who utter song by night, and are silent by day for the sake of Israel’s glory…” And the idea here is that the angels sing by night but during the day they are silent so God can listen to the prayers of the people.

Now this is an idea that fits in with the pattern of Revelation so far. In Chapter 4, we were taken into the worship of the angels and the worship of the whole of creation before the throne of God and now, John tells us that there is silence in heaven and, by-passing verse 2 just for a moment and looking at verse 3 we read: “Another angel with a golden censer came and stood at the altar; he was given a great quantity of incense to offer with the prayers of all the saints on the golden altar that is before the throne.” So, in good Jewish tradition, heaven falls silent so God can hear the prayers of his people. Let’s just look at this description in a bit more detail…

“Another angel with a golden censer came and stood at the altar.” What we actually read in the Greek is that the angel “took his place” at the altar; there is something very deliberate about this action, almost a liturgical action, something profound, something pre-ordained - a deliberate movement towards the altar. “He was given a great quantity of incense to offer with the prayers”. Now, we have come across incense before, in 5:8, but there is a subtle difference between the two references. In 5:8, we read, “The twenty-four elders fell before the Lamb, each holding a harp and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints.” There, the incense is the prayers of the saints. But in 8:3, the incense is offered with the prayers of the saints. It’s a subtle difference – but an important one because I think what we see in Chapter 8 is the worship of heaven and earth coming together as one before the throne. In chapter 5, the prayers of the people came as incense before God. In chapter 8, the prayers of the people and the incense come before God; the prayers from humans, the incense from angels.

And in that verse, we are reminded of just how important our prayers are to God. They come before him with “a great quantity of incense” and our prayers are laid on a golden altar, which is, of course, a symbol of great worth. That is very encouraging for us. Sometimes, when we pray, we think we are making little difference; our prayers seem inconsequential almost as if we are wasting God’s time with our petty requests. But it’s a lovely thought that, every time you pray, an angel carries your prayer to the throne of God and incense is wafted in heaven and your prayer is left before the throne on a golden altar. Verse 4: “And the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, rose before God from the hand of the angel.” If that doesn’t transform the way you view your prayers, nothing will!

But now we get a sense of the responsibility of our prayers and this is quite an awesome spiritual truth, so get ready…Verse 5: “Then the angel took the censer and filled it with fire from the altar and threw it on the earth; and there were peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning, and an earthquake.” Now, what we have here is the beginnings of the pouring out of the judgements of God…in response to the prayers of the saints. God brings his judgements to the earth as a response to your prayers and mine…Now this is a complex reality for us to comprehend, so let’s work through it.

If you remember back to 6:10, the saints were under the altar and they cried out, “Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long will it be before you judge and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?” You may remember that these were the prayers of the martyrs, asking God to do what was right and justify his sovereignty in the light of unrighteousness on earth.

Perhaps we can summarise that prayer in three words: “Your kingdom come…” And what do we pray regularly, if not every day in our lives through the Lord’s Prayer? “Your kingdom come…” Now, this is a phrase that rolls off our lips very easily and it becomes a habit for us – we give little thought to what we are saying but, actually, it’s the most powerful prayer-phrase in the world. Because when we pray, “Your kingdom come”, we are asking God to bring judgement on ungodliness in the world to cleanse the cosmos from all that is antichrist and to bring his reign to absolute completion. And we need to take responsibility for the fact that when we are praying “Your kingdom come…”, we are actually praying for the intensification and final completion of every spiritual battle in the cosmos. These are not trite words: we need to take responsibility for what we pray for.

And what we see in Chapter 8 is the end result of what we are praying for when we say, “Your kingdom come…” That prayer, when it leaves our lips, is carried up to heaven and, with the incense of the angels, laid on a golden altar before the throne of God. And if we don’t want God to act on it, we shouldn’t pray it. Because God acting on it will inevitably mean the bringing of judgement as well as salvation. And that’s what we see here…

Now, we skipped verse 2 but we need to go back to it: “And I saw the seven angels who stand before God, and seven trumpets were given to them.” Who are these angels and what are these trumpets?

Seven, as we have seen over and over again in Revelation is the number of completion and wholeness so the fact that there are seven angels is a symbol of the fact that the whole of the spiritual realm is engaged with what is about to happen. But, just out of interest, there is a Jewish book called Tobit and in Tobit 12:15, there is a verse that says, “there are seven angels who present the prayers of the saints and enter into the presence of the glory of the Holy One.” And in another Jewish book, 1 Enoch 20, these angels are given names: Uriel, Raphael, Raguel, Michael, Saraqael, Gabriel and Remiel. Maybe those are the seven angels referred to here, maybe not but they are given seven trumpets. Why trumpets? Well, in Judaism, trumpets symbolised two things…

First, they symbolised warning of a coming war and a summoning of men to battle. For example, in Judges 3:27, we read, “When [Ehud] arrived, he sounded the trumpet in the hill country of Ephraim; and the Israelites went down with him from the hill country.” In Nehemiah 4:18, we read, “Each of the builders had his sword strapped at his side while he built. The man who sounded his trumpet was beside me.” And so, in Israelite theology, the sounding of a trumpet is a warning of the battle that is to come and so, when Zephaniah describes the coming Day of the Lord, he writes: “That day will be a day of wrath, a day of distress and anguish, a day of ruin and devastation, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness, a day of trumpet blast and battle cry…” And a final example from Joel 2:1, where he too describes the Day of the Lord: “Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy mountain! Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming, it is near…”

But secondly, the sounding of the trumpet also heralds joy as well as warning. In Numbers 10:10, the instruction is given, “On your days of rejoicing, at your appointed festivals, and at the beginning of your months, you shall blow the trumpets…” In Leviticus 23, we read of the Festival of Trumpets, a great Jewish occasion. Plenty of other examples could be given but the idea is clear…You and I – and every Christian since Christ taught us - has prayed, “Your Kingdom come…” and, as a result of that prayer, the Day of the Lord comes and, for some, it is a Day to be warned about and for others, it will be a day of joy and gladness and celebration.

Now, I just want to pause here for a moment and just reflect on where we are at  in terms of the overall structure of Revelation. I’ve said a few times that I believe the structure of Revelation to be the same period of history, from the first coming to the Second Coming viewed seven times from seven different perspectives. The first viewing was Chapters 1-3 and the perspective was that of the church on earth and the various sufferings and crises we would encounter. The second viewing was from Chapters 4-8:1, which was the judgements of God but the emphasis there was actually on the Lamb of God who opens the seals, which taught us that God has a plan for his world and it is being unrolled through the Lamb of God. Now we come to the third viewing of the same period, which will take us through Chapters 8-11 and so there is a sense in which the Trumpets mirror the Seals.

Now, this is important because some people read this part of Revelation thinking that the Seven Trumpets are the contents of the Seventh Seal. That is not true. The seventh seal is opened and there is silence in heaven: 8:1 and that in itself is the seventh seal, the Day of the Lord, which will be described in detail elsewhere in Revelation. It would actually have been more helpful if 8:1 was actually 7:18, because it is the end of that section rather than the beginning of the new section, which is 8:2-11:19, but that’s the way the Bible is structured and we are stuck with it…

So we come to this third perspective on history, symbolised by the blowing of the seven trumpets and we can look at the first four of these now. Now there is a logical split between the first four and the last three trumpets - or actually, the split is four, two and one - because the first four relate to the forces of nature and the last three to people. So let’s look at these four trumpets…

Verse 7: “The first angel blew his trumpet, and there came hail and fire, mixed with blood, and they were hurled to the earth.” Now, with the blowing of the trumpets, we are going to be taken back to the plagues that fell on Egypt during the time of Moses. And this first trumpet corresponds to the final Egyptian plague, Exodus 9:23: “Then Moses stretched out his staff towards heaven, and the Lord sent thunder and hail, and fire came down upon the earth.” There is no mention of blood in Exodus but it does fit in with another Jewish Text, the Sybilline Oracles, verse 377: “Fire shall rain on mortal men from the fields of heaven, fire and blood, water, meteor, darkness, heaven’s night…”

Clearly what is being suggested here is that cataclysmic changes in weather and the forces of nature that create damage and cause bloodshed will be a sign of the end times. But the warning of this trumpet, as we would expect is a limited warning, verse 7 again: “A third of the earth was burned up, and a third of all the trees were burned up, and all green grass was burned up.” A significant proportion is damaged – but not the whole earth: this is not the end, it is just the beginning of the end and even now, if the warnings are recognised for what they are; there is still time for repentance and a turning to God.

Then, in verse 8, the second angel blows his trumpet and, we read, “something like a great mountain, burning with fire, was thrown into the sea.” Again, this takes us back to the Sibylline Oracles, verse 158: “Then shall come a great star from heaven into the divine sea, and shall burn up the deep sea…”

Of course, the point of this second trumpet is that it stands in contrast to the first: the first one burnt up the land and this one burns up the sea. And, as with the first trumpet, the impact is on a third: “A third of the sea became blood, a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed.”

This warning draws our minds back to two Old Testament passages. The first is the first plague of Egypt, Exodus 7:20, “Moses lifted up his staff and struck the water in the river, and all the water in the river turned into blood, and the fish in the river died.” There are obvious differences between Revelation and Exodus here but the parallels are clear as well. But perhaps the first hearers would have thought about Psalm 46:2: “We will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea; though its water roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult.”

Then the third trumpet sounds, verses 10-11, which is a clearer parallel with the first plague in Exodus 7: “The third angel blew his trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became wormwood, and many died from the water, because it was made bitter.”

Now, this verse from Scripture became very famous 26 years ago this week because on 26 April 1986, as many of you will remember, there was the Chernobyl disaster and, as many Christians were quick to point out ‘Chernobyl’ is the Ukrainian word for Wormwood. Well, as usual with Christians who try to find hidden meanings in Scripture, they were nearly right, but most wrong! Chernobyl actually isn’t the Ukranian word for Wormwood - it is actually the Ukranian word for the plant family ‘artemisium’ and one of the plants that comes within that family is the bitter plant, Wormwood. Secondly, the Greek word for the plant is not Wormwood but Apsinthos, which is regularly translated as wormwood because whenever it is used in Ancient Greek literature, it is a symbol for bitterness. So the emphasis of the verse is actually on the bitterness of God’s judgement rather than John prophesying an event that would happen 1,890 years after writing the letter, which, to be honest, would be a pretty pointless thing to write about to Christians under persecution from the Roman Empire and struggling to survive in the face of Jewish aggression.

And to back that up, we want to look, as always, to the Old Testament, which is the source of so much of John’s vision and, as we do so, we come to Jeremiah 9:15 where God promises punishment on all those who have turned to idolatrous worship: “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God if Israel: I am feeding this people with wormwood, and giving them poisonous water to drink” And again in Jeremiah 25:15-16, “I am going to make them eat wormwood, and give them poisoned water to drink; for from the prophets of Jerusalem ungodliness has spread throughout all the land.”

Now this seems to me to be a far more rational explanation of Rev 8:10-11; that the imagery is steeped in the Old Testament idea that God will bring warning and judgement on those who have been tempted into idolatry: it certainly fits with everything we have read so far…

The most interesting thing to me about this verse, which I have no answer to, is why John says, “many died from the water…” but he doesn’t say “a third of the people died from the water…” I just have to hold my hands up at this point and say “I have no idea!” and I haven’t found any decent explanation in commentaries either…

Then, verse 12, the fourth angel blows his trumpet “and a third of the sun was struck, and a third of the moon, and a third of the stars, so that a third of their light was darkened.” This brings us back to the ninth plague in Egypt, Exodus 10:22: “So Moses stretched out his hand towards heaven, and there was dense darkness in all the land of Egypt for three days.”

Clearly John was no astronomer because the implications of this trumpet don’t actually make any sense: “A third of the day was kept from shining, and likewise the night”. The reality, of course, would be that the intensity of the light would be impacted by a 33% reduction, not the length of time light shone. But John isn’t trying to make an astronomical point here: he is dealing with symbol and metaphor…And the metaphor he is drawing on is that those lost in sin are living in darkness and only the light of Christ will be enough to bring them to salvation so the hope is that people in darkness will recognise their need for light and turn to Christ accordingly.

And so we conclude our study tonight with 8:13: “Then I looked, and I heard an eagle crying with a loud voice as it flew in midheaven, ‘Woe, woe, woe to the inhabitants of the earth, at the blasts of the other trumpets that the three angels are about to blow!”

Interestingly, this seems to be the only time in Jewish literature when an eagle brings a message of woe and warning. The only possible interpretation I can think of for this anomaly is that the word for ‘eagle’, which is ‘aetos’, can also mean ‘vulture’ and that reminds us of Luke 17:37, where Jesus says, “Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather.” And certainly Jesus uses the same word in the plural, ‘aetoi’, there, so perhaps that is some insight that may be useful.

But regardless of that fact, the eagle or vulture cries, “Woe, woe, woe”: one ‘Woe’ for each of the remaining trumpets yet to be blown.

And there is one interesting biblical twist to be noted here when we compare this verse with Hosea 8:1. In Hosea, we read, “Set the trumpet to your lips! One like a vulture is over the house of the Lord, because they have broken my covenant and transgressed my law.” In both Hosea and Revelation, there is a warning of impending judgement for ungodliness and unfaithfulness to God. But in Hosea, the trumpets warn of the vulture that is coming and in Revelation, the vulture warns of the trumpets that are coming…a nice little twist on the use of Scripture by John.

So there we have Revelation 8 – another complex and very challenging section, with much to contemplate…

It is our prayers, when we say “Your kingdom come…” that hasten the Day of Judgement: what we ask for, we will receive.

But that Day will be preceded by warnings from God that are limited in their impact, so there is still time for people to repent.

What do those warnings look like?

There is impact on the created order; the land, the sea and the rivers, and we must take that ecological chaos as a warning from God. We can read specific incidents into this passage from Scripture - and that has been done many times throughout history - the destruction of Pompeii, the Black Plague, the onset of AIDs, Chernobyl, the Fukushima disaster and so much more…And whilst these may be the type of event that John is referring to, we do a disservice to this portion of Scripture if we try to pinpoint any one of these events as an actual working out of Revelation 8. It is naïve to say that Revelation 8:10 is Chernobyl. It is naïve to say that Revelation 8:7 is Global Warming and so on…

But we do learn from this passage that we are in the last days; however long that period will last: 2,000 years or 20,000 years we don’t know. But the onus is on us to keep praying for the coming of God’s Kingdom, to make sure that our hearts are right with God and to tell others the Good News of God’s salvation so that they too may be ready to meet with him when that seventh seal is finally opened and we all face the judgement seat of God in heaven.

Sermon on Revelation 7:1-17

So we return to the Book of Revelation after an Easter break and I hope you remember where we have got up to so far. We have explored the history of the world, as it were, from the first coming of Jesus to the second coming. Firstly from a church perspective in Revelation 1-3. Then we have moved to a heavenly perspective on the same period of history in Revelation 4 looking at the worship that is going on in heaven, in Revelation 5 thinking about how the divine plan is unrolled by the Lamb and, in Revelation 6, we thought about the opening of the first six seals and the consequential judgements of God on the world. And we left Chapter 6 with the sixth seal being opened that brought us to the brink of the Day of Judgement.

But now John takes a little interlude before the opening of the seventh and final seal. The end of Chapter 6 showed the people on earth in fear and terror and panic, hiding amongst the mountains and the rocks trying to avoid the wrath of God. But then, rather than completing this story, John takes us back to heaven to introduce us to the 144,000 and the Great Multitude. And he probably does that to bring us comfort again as he has done continuously throughout the Book of Revelation. It’s as if he is saying that Christians have nothing to fear from the Day of Judgement, that we have the assurance of salvation and he wants to take us deeper into that idea in Chapter 7. So the first thing to say about tonight’s passage is that it is one that should inspire comfort, not fear: to comfort us and provide reassurance is the purpose of this passage.

OK, so let’s move into the text itself.

Verse 1: “After this I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding back the four winds of the earth to prevent any wind from blowing on the land or the sea or on any tree.”

The angels, as we have seen already, are God’s agents to the world: sometimes they are human beings, as the angels of the churches in Chapters 1-3, sometimes they are spiritual beings, as in Chapter 4. I think what we have here is a reference to the spiritual beings and the point John is making is this: the spiritual agents of God stand over all creation; there is no part of creation that is outside God’s control: they are at the four corners of the earth. And their role is to prevent any wind from blowing on the land until the appointed time, which comes later. So what is meant by these four winds? Well, there are a couple of possible interpretations.

First, wind is often used in Scripture as a metaphor for destruction. For example, in Jeremiah 4:11-12 we read, “At that time this people and Jerusalem will be told, ‘A scorching wind from the barren heights in the desert blows towards my people, but not to winnow or cleanse; a wind too strong for that comes from me. Now I pronounce my judgements against them.” So perhaps John is saying that Christians will be spared from the destruction of the world that is about to take place because the angels are holding the winds back for a period.

The second interpretation is very similar and draws us back to the imagery of Chapter 6 with the four horsemen of the apocalypse. We need to go to Zechariah 6:5-8 to follow through with this idea. In Zechariah, four chariots were sent out; one with a red horse, one with a black horse, one with a white horse, one with a dappled horse and they went to the four corners of the world. Zechariah asks the angels what these chariots are and an angel replies, “These are the four winds of heaven, going out from standing in the presence of the Lord of the whole world.” So perhaps John is drawing on the Zechariah imagery here and combining it with the idea of the four horsemen of the apocalypse and stating that the judgements they bring are being held back for a period of time by the spiritual angels of God. And, by being held back, no damage can be wrought upon the earth.

Of course, there is not an exact parallel with Zechariah because the reference there is to the winds of heaven and John, in Revelation 7, refers to the winds of the earth, so either interpretation is possible. But I think the idea is clear: God’s judgement is coming – but it is a controlled judgement and will only happen at the right time.

And, to reinforce the notion of comfort for believers, in verse 2 we read that another angel comes, this time from the East. In Scripture, there is a prevailing idea that blessings come from the East. The sun rises in the East. The Garden of Eden was in the East. The wise men came from the East. In Ezekiel 43:2, we read, “I saw the glory of the God of Israel coming from the East” and it was a predominant idea in Jewish writings that the Messiah would come from the East. So the idea that an angels comes from the East would have inspired a sense of comfort, even relief in the minds of the first hearers of Revelation. Here are the judgements of God, symbolised by the wind, being held back by the angels whilst another angel comes from the east.

And this angel has the seal of the living God. The Book of Revelation comes from a pre-literate era when most people couldn’t read, of course, and so a seal was an important sign of ownership. Members of a guild would have a seal like a tattoo on them. Members of religious organisations would have had the same. Cattle were marked with the seal of the owner. So here is an angel coming from the East, a sign of blessing, and the fact that he is marked by the seal of God means that he is coming on behalf of God and the blessing he is about to bestow is, in fact, the blessing of God. Again, a great symbol of reassurance and compassion.

But what is the blessing that this angel brings from God just prior to the final judgement? Verse 3: “Do not harm the land or the sea or the trees until we put a seal on the foreheads of the servants of our God.” Now this is quite a complex verse and I’m afraid we need to go back to the Greek to get to the heart of it. The meaning, in general, is clear: God will put a seal on his people prior to the final judgement to give us protection through his ownership. That much is clear. However, there are two important things to say about this process.

First, the Greek doesn’t say “servants of our God” - it says “slaves of our God”. And by using the word ‘slave’, the idea is one of utter devotion and complete submission to God, the giving up of any personal rights, ambition and even identity. Those who are to be sealed are those who are completely and utterly devoted to God, those who have given their whole life over to God and find their true identity in him. So we have a stark reminder here of the sheer importance of taking our life of faith seriously and not playing at being a Christian.

But secondly, we need to consider the phrase ‘until we put a seal on…’ because the tense and mood of this comment is important. If you’re interested, it’s an Aorist Subjunctive but the names not important so much as the idea, that an Aorist Subjunctive indicates an event that may or may not happen depending on the faithfulness of the individual to make it happen. So for example, in Romans 6:4 Paul writes, “we should walk in newness of life” - that is an Aorist Subjunctive: whether or not we walk in newness of life is dependent on our response. And the same idea holds true here: the angel of God, bringing blessing from the East will seal those whose way of living takes seriously the call on us to be faithful slaves of God.

Will you or I be sealed before the last day? It’s up to us and the extent to which we take seriously our walk with God. That’s not to say that we need to be perfect – of course that’s not possible but our intent must always be to follow to the best of our ability and to seek to find our identity in Christ. It’s a huge responsibility that is laid on us in this verse: we can’t afford to be complacent in the faith and this re-iterates what we read a few chapters ago when the Risen Christ stressed how much he loathes lukewarm faith.

And so we arrive at perhaps the most famous part of this passage and one of the most famous symbols in Revelation: the number of those who will be sealed is 144,000. What does this mean? Now, we could spend ages on this, probably a whole sermon series exploring the various options, and I don’t want to get too hung up on it because to do so would be to follow the populist route of treating this section as if it were any more ‘special’ than everything else we have encountered in Revelation so far. It is not any more – or any less – special than any other part. It is yet another symbol for us to work through.

Why is it that that number of those sealed by God is 144,000? Some commentators have suggested that 144,000 represent the Jews who are saved, either metaphorically or literally. They compare that to the Great Multitude in verse 9, which symbolises the Gentile believers, of whom you and I are a part. But I don’t think that’s a plausible explanation because it still suggests that only the Jewish believers have the seal of God on them whereas we will see later, in 9:4, that the whole church is sealed by God. The whole church of God is the New Israel. Other commentators have suggested that the 144,000 represent the whole church throughout time because there were 12 Tribes of Israel and there were 12 Disciples and if you multiply 12 by 12, you get 144 and multiply that by 1000, which is a number for completeness then you get 144,000: the church throughout all time.

To be honest, I’m not sure which interpretation is correct and I don’t think we need to get too hung up on it, for two reasons. First, because despite how the calculation is made the meaning is clear: the 144,000 represent those sealed by God before the tribulation and grasping that fact is the most important thing. But secondly, by getting hung up on the calculation, we miss two very important things about the list of the tribes of Israel that is in verses 5-8.

The first is this: The list of tribes begins with the tribe of Judah and this is the only time in Scripture when the list of tribes begins with that one. Now, of course, we know that Jesus descended from the tribe of Judah and so John is making a theological point here about who is head of the Church. The starting point of our salvation, metaphorically, is the man from the tribe of Judah.

The second point is this: One of the tribes is actually missing from the list: there is no mention of the tribe of Dan and Dan has been replaced, in verse 6, with the tribe of Manasseh, which actually wasn’t a tribe at all but a sub-section of the tribe of Joseph! So what is the significance of omitting the tribe of Dan? Throughout Jewish theology, Dan has represented idolatry. In Numbers 2:25, we are told that Dan dwelt in the North and just as blessings come from the East, so it was thought that spiritual darkness came from the North. And you may remember the story from 1 Kings 12 where King Jeroboam tried to get the people to worship his golden calves and the only people who would were the tribe of Dan.

So, historically, people have made a meal out of trying to work out where the number 144,000 comes from but, in so doing, they seem to have missed the real point of the list which is this: the salvation of the Church derives from Christ, represented by Judah and salvation is not an option for any who are lost in idolatry.

So if tonight, you were waiting for an answer to ‘why 144,000’? I’m sorry to disappoint you! But I think there is something far more profound for us to learn here…

Given the context of these verses, we face a real challenge here: the sealing of the saints is very much dependent on our willingness to take the Christian life seriously and live out our ‘slave-ship’ to God: verse 3 and that inevitably means looking to Christ as the source of our salvation, verse 5, and rejecting any form of idolatry – verse 6. There we are – simple as that! Nothing mysterious at all…

So we come on to verse 9: “After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no-one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.” In this verse, I think John is drawing us back to the covenant made with Abraham, right back at the beginning of human history, Genesis 15:5 when God says to Abraham, “Look up at the heavens and count the stars I if indeed you can count them. So shall your offspring be.” The church, which no one can number, is the fulfilment of the Abrahamic covenant between God and humanity.

Now, I want to dispel a myth here; that this great multitude comprises of those who have been martyred and this seems to be a classic interpretation of this verse but there is no Biblical evidence for that. Never once does John hint that this should be interpreted as the martyrs and we mustn’t get confused by verses 13 & 14, which says: “Who are they – where did they come from?” and the angels answers, “They are those who have come out of the great tribulation; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” But surely that is all of us? That certainly fits in with what we have read previously in Revelation! All of us who are sealed by God before the tribulation are numbered here; we are all wearing robes of white, we have all been purified by the blood of the Lamb: that’s what we learnt from Chapters 3 and 4, isn’t it?

And so in verse 9, we get a sense of the universal nature of the Church: every nation, tribe, people and language included. And, of course, as we read in Chapter 4, we are standing before the throne in heaven and in front of the Lamb, which is to say our eternal destiny is to be in the presence of God. We are clothed in white – we’ve already though about how that represents both victory and purity but it’s interesting that the word for ‘robe’ used here is not our ordinary day-to-day clothes but celebration garments. And we are told that the great multitude were waving palm branches, which, of course, brings us back to Palm Sunday and the idea that the Palm Branch is a symbol of victory and so they are waved by the church in front of the Messiah to acknowledge his victory over sin and death. Palm Sunday redeemed.

And so, in verse 10, we read that the church in heaven cries out: “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.” And that’s a significant cry because we will see it paralleled at two other points in Revelation, in 12:10 and in 19:1. In 12:10, the cry is made when Satan is ejected from heaven. In 19:1, the cry is made at the overthrow of the anti-Christ. So here, in chapter 7, the whole church rejoices together in the victory of the Messiah over Satan and all that is antichrist. And, as we would expect, the whole of creation, the whole of heaven and earth joins in with the church in this victory song: verse 11, “All the angels were standing round the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures. They fell down on their faces before the throne and worshipped God…”

We’ve considered verses 13-14 already so we conclude with verses 15 to 17, which offer us a beautiful description of our eternal destiny in heaven:

“They are before the throne of God”. Where else would we possibly wish to spend eternity?

“They serve him day and night in his temple”. What a privilege to join with the angels in being a servant of the living God.

“And he who sits on the throne will spread his tent over them.” The word used here for ‘spreading his tent’ is related to the Hebrew word ‘shekinah’, which indicates the glory of God that rests on the people of God as a symbol of his presence with them so this is a very intimate phrase about God’s eternal care for us.

“Never again will they hunger; never again will they thirst. The sun will not beat upon them, nor any scorching heat.” This reminds us of the promise in Isaiah 49:10 that is made to the people of Israel for when they returned from exile in Babylon: “They will neither hunger nor thirst, nor will the desert heat or the sun beat upon them.”

“For the Lamb at the centre of the throne will be their shepherd; he will lead them to springs of living water.” Again, a reminder of Isaiah 49:10, which continues: “He who has compassion on them will guide them and lead them beside springs of water.” God will provide all our needs for all eternity.

And then, finally, this beautiful phrase, “And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.” We are brought back to Isaiah again, this time 25:8, which says, “The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces.” There will be no sorrow in heaven, no mourning, no sorrow; quite literally, an eternity of bliss.

So here we have quite an incredible chapter of Scripture. We began it with some fear and trembling: Chapter 6 had ended on the brink of the Day of Judgement with people running scared and trying to hide from the wrath of God and we were bound to ask the question: “Is that us? Is that to be our destiny? Is that the terrible fate that awaits us?” But, in his pastoral concern, John takes a detour from the narrative to assure us that, for those in Christ, there is quite a different destiny awaiting us.

God has it all under control: the angels are holding back the winds of destruction and in the meantime, all those who seek to serve the Lord are receiving the seal of salvation. And the seal will be placed on all those who take their faith seriously, those who place Christ in the highest authority and do not give in to idolatrous living. Those marked out for salvation will come from each and every nation and together we will celebrate the victory of the Messiah for all eternity. All creation will join us in the worship of God. We will spend all eternity in the presence of God, serving him and enjoying his compassion and care for us as he meets our every need and takes away all suffering and sorrow.

Now that is a message of real encouragement and hope. But, of course, there is a challenge for us too: we need to attend to our own lives and reflect on our desire to follow the way of Christ and commit ourselves to the life of discipleship. As I said earlier, that is not the same thing as saying we need to be perfect or that, when we get things wrong, we are somehow unworthy of salvation: that’s not what I am saying at all and that is certainly not what this passage is saying. Ultimately, this passage is not about our efforts – about us needing to earn salvation. It’s a passage about the gracious compassion of God who seals all those who acknowledge his sovereignty. Our task in life is to sit under that sovereignty and enjoy the grace of God. Jesus says in John 10:10, “I have come that they may have life in all its fullness”. That fullness of life begins here on earth and continues for all eternity and we praise God for the offer of his seal on our lives and we respond to that.

Easter Day sermon, John 20:1-18

“Mary turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realise that it was Jesus. ‘Woman,’ he said, ‘why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?’”

Graveyards are strange places, in that they bring up different emotions for different people. For the recently bereaved, they can be places of grief and sadness. For the historian, they are places of interest and data collection. For the Church Gardening Group, they are a place of toil and pleasure in equal measure. For children, they can be playgrounds; great for hide and seek. Graveyards bring up a range of emotions in us, depending on our life experience.

Mary Magdalene came to the graveyard that Sunday morning with a mixture of emotions about graveyards. Only a week before, she had been standing in another graveyard; the one where a tomb housed their friend Lazarus. Now that had been a visit to a graveyard she would never forget: Lazarus had been ill for a while and Mary and Martha, his sisters, had called on Jesus to come and heal him but Jesus had dallied on the way, taking too long to arrive and by the time he got there, Lazarus was dead. Mary and Martha were beside themselves with grief and were angry that Jesus hadn’t responded quicker. But little did they know what incredible miracle was about to happen: Jesus drew near to Lazarus’ tomb and called him out and, within a matter of minutes, their brother stood before them, back from the dead. Jesus had wowed the crowd by raising Lazarus from the dead: an incredible display of his authority and power.

The graveyard was a good place to be that day! The graveyard was a place of victory, a place of miracles, a place of uncontained joy.

But that was seven days ago.

A lot can happen in seven days…

The triumphal entry in Jerusalem had soon resulted in opposition: the crowd had turned, the mood had soured and then the atrocities of Good Friday dealt a crushing blow to the hopes and dreams of Mary and her friends.

How could it all have gone so wrong?

Had the last three years been for nothing?

What about the brave new world that Jesus had promised? What about the least becoming first? What about this new world order where the meek would inherit the earth? What about this promise of life in all its fullness? These words seemed to ring hollow for Mary now as she stood in the graveyard.

Last week, she had been in a graveyard that spoke to her of victory and joy. This week, she stands in a graveyard that speaks to her of defeat and loss.

How could it all have gone so wrong?

And so Mary moves towards the tomb of Jesus and grief consumes her heart. John reminds us of that in verse 1 when he comments, “It was still dark”. The sunrise had yet to happen, both physically and metaphorically: for Mary, in body and soul, “It was still dark”. And she arrives at the tomb and, to her horror, the stone has been removed, lifted out of the groove in which it had been placed. Mary is beside herself in fear and sadness: this is the final humiliation, the final betrayal by the authorities. What has Jesus done that they should treat him with such lack of respect? It was more than enough to have him arrested. It was more than enough to have him put on trial. It was more than enough to have him publicly flogged and tortured. It was certainly more than enough to have him crucified. But now it seemed that grave robbers have taken the body and who wouldn’t bet their last denarius on the Roman authorities being behind this despicable ruse?

So she runs off the tell Simon Peter and John the terrible news and she is convinced that Jesus’ body has been mistreated in death just as badly as it had been in life: in verse 42 of chapter 19 we read, “They laid Jesus in a tomb” and there is a gentleness about the verb; laying out the body, so compare that with the violence of verse 2 of our reading, “We don’t know where they’ve put him”.

Simon Peter and John run to the tomb. John gets there first, he bend over, he peers inside – but he didn’t dare to go in. No such bashfulness with Simon Peter: always a man in a hurry, he reaches the tomb and goes straight inside and sees the linen cloths which had been wrapped around Jesus’ body.

For the first time, there is an indication that something very special has taken place. When Lazarus was raised from the dead, he came out of the tomb still wrapped in his linen cloths but this scene is now looking very different. The cloths are neatly folded, the napkin for the head is in a separate place. This is a carefully laid out scene, designed to show the disciples and followers that something unique has taken place. Lazarus had been resuscitated but Jesus has been resurrected, and the two events are quite different…

And grasping that point, that Jesus was not merely resuscitated but resurrected is at the very heart of the Easter story and what we believe as Christians. Because in the next verse, John says of himself, in the third person as usual: “He saw and believed”. There’s two things to note about this comment…

First, it seems he is comparing himself rather favourably with the disciple Thomas who, in a few verses time, says: “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it.” What a contrast between the faith of John and Thomas.

But I think there’s something even more profound about this comment, which takes us to the very heart of the passage this morning…

John is confronted by an empty tomb – and he sees and believes. He doesn’t even have to see the risen Christ to believe: the empty tomb is enough…And I think that’s a key point for us all as Christians, and for those of us here today who may not consider ourselves Christians, that the empty tomb is enough: the empty tomb is the basis of our faith. We don’t need to see great miracles to believe. We don’t need to have profound answers to prayer to believe. We don’t need writing in the sky or a vision of Jesus to believe. The empty tomb is enough…The empty tomb is the greatest miracle of all. The empty tomb is the most profound answer to humanity’s deepest question. The empty tomb is God’s message to us.

The empty tomb is enough…

“He saw and believed”.

And John stresses this by the way in which he uses the word ‘saw’ in verses 5 and 6. In verse 5, we read that John bent over, looked in and saw the strips of linen, the word used for ‘saw’ here has to do with the eye – to physically see. But in verse 6, we read that Peter went into the tomb and saw the strips of linen but the word used for ‘saw’ in this verse is different and it has more to do with contemplating an event. And then, in verse 8, we read that, “He saw and believed” and now a third Greek word for ‘saw’ is used, which has more to do with spiritual insight and understanding. And so, in these three verses, John uses one idea, ‘to see’ and he uses three different Greek words for that action to describe the spiritual journey that each one of us goes on in the light of the empty tomb of Jesus.

We see the facts.

We contemplate the facts.

We understand the spiritual implication of those facts.

The journey of faith into which we are all called this Easter Morning: see, contemplate, understand.

But as we go through this process of seeing, contemplating and understanding, it would be wrong to suggest that the empty tomb gets rid of all our doubts, that the empty tomb makes it easy to believe: of course it doesn’t. All of us continue to have doubts and wrestle with poor understanding about God. And that’s exactly what we see in this Easter story.

The disciples leave the tomb and go back to where they had come from, with confusions running through their minds. And Mary is left alone at the tomb – weeping and mourning her loss. We might well ask how the disciples, 11 men brave and true, can leave a woman at a graveside in great distress particularly as the word John uses here for crying indicates wailing and sobbing but that’s by the by…Mary stays behind and, in her grief, bends over and peers inside presumably to see if it really is true or not…And what she sees shocks the life out of her!

Now there are two angels in white, seated where Jesus had been laid: how much more weird can her day become? Perhaps, though, she didn’t recognise them as angels: in Scripture, angels are always differentiated from human beings  by their powers, not by any significant change of form. And here, we are not told that the angels looked any different from humans but only that they are clothed in white just as the men who visited the disciples at the ascension of Jesus were dressed in white. “Woman, why are you crying?” they ask.

And as soon as she answers, she turns round and sees Jesus standing there but she doesn’t recognise him and he asks her the same question but also adds a vital second question: “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you seek?”

What a profound question! Perhaps the same question could be asked of each one of us today: we have bothered to get out of bed this Easter morning and we have bothered to come to church. Why? Who do you seek?

And, as Jesus asks here this question, she thinks he’s the gardener and her utter devotion to her beloved Lord shines through in her response: “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him”. Mary never pauses to think how she will move the corpse of a full-grown man; she just wants to do what is right by Jesus because she loves him so much.

And, in response to this overwhelming sign of devotion, Jesus reveals his identity to her. And there is a real intimacy to this moment: when Jesus reveals himself to us, he calls us by name: “Mary”, “Steve”, “Nanette”, “Darren”. We hear Jesus call us by name – and it is enough.

Who do you seek? The Messiah who calls you by name this morning…

And then Jesus gives Mary a command: “Do not hold on to me…” Some have taken this to mean that Mary is not allowed to touch the resurrected body of Jesus but I don’t think it means that at all…The tense Jesus uses here suggests a repeated or continuous action, so I think he is speaking metaphorically to Mary and to us: Don’t cling on to Jesus of Nazareth, do not think that the earthly story of Jesus is all there is to it: it’s amazing how many people do that, how many people revere the earthly Jesus as if he were a good man or a fine prophet or a moral example to us all. And he was all those things – but he was more than that: he still is more than that…

We are not to cling on to our ideas of the earthly Jesus but we are to allow him to ascend to the Father. And he has to ascend to the Father so the story can be completed: once he ascends, the Holy Spirit can be sent and, eventually, Jesus can return again in judgement and salvation.

So Mary runs to the disciples with the news and proclaims to them: “I have seen the Lord!” And surprise, surprise, a fourth Greek word is used here for ‘to see’ and the tense used implies that the seeing will have ongoing implications for her future.

So this passage takes us on a spiritual journey; a journey through which we see more and more clearly. First, we see the physical evidence of the empty tomb. Second, we contemplate the evidence of the empty tomb. Third, we develop spiritual understanding and insight about the resurrection. Finally, we see the implications of that for our future lives.

Jesus said to Mary, “Who do you seek?” Jesus says to each one of us today, “Who do you seek?” “What do you see?” “Have you grasped the implications of the resurrection?”

Where are you on the journey of faith? Have you seen? Have you contemplated? Have you understood? Then complete the Easter story in your own life and grasp the implications of the resurrected Christ for your own life. Because the resurrected Christ brings us forgiveness. The resurrected Christ brings us wholeness and healing The resurrected Christ brings us a new identity and fullness of life.

The Easter story is not one to be confined to the history books: it is a living experience for each one of us as we learn to truly see Christ for who he is and the impact he can have on our lives.

Who do you seek? Who do you see?

In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus simply said: “Seek and you will find”.

Sermon on John 19:38-42, the burial of Jesus

Jesus has been mocked and tortured and beaten. He has been spat on and forced to go through a mock trial. He has been whipped and brutally crucified. He has died and his side has been pierced with a sword.

The deed has been done…

It’s over…

It would have been Roman custom to leave the body of a crucified man to hang on the cross for a few days to come. This would act as a deterrent for others who thought it a good idea to challenge the authority of the ruling Empire and, of course, it would give the vultures something to feed on. But this is Passover weekend and the Sabbath is approaching, a day of solemnity, and it would be an affront to God to have the body of a Jewish man hanging in such a way. So the request is made to have Jesus’ body removed and buried.

Pilate acquiesces: anything to keep the Jews happy. And it’s not just Jesus’ body he allows to be removed. In verse 31, we read that all the bodies of the crucified men were removed for burial. Even in this act of removal and burial, Jesus was just one of the corpses: numbered amongst the dead – nothing special about him at all.

But perhaps there was something special about the request, given the fact of who made the request and who carried out the act of burial…

In verse 38, we read that the request was made by “Joseph of Arimathea, who was a disciple of Jesus, though a secret one because of his fear of the Jews.” Who was this Joseph?

In the Gospels, he is identified as a member of the Jewish Council that had originally put Jesus on trial and handed him over to Pilate. But in Luke 22:50, we read that, even though he was a member of the Council, he had not agreed with the decision to hand Jesus over. Joseph, from the Judean town of Arimathea, which is just north of Jerusalem, was counted as a disciple of Jesus. He must have lived with a terrible burden for who knows how long: his public role as a member of the Council would have been to denounce and oppose the ministry of this strange carpenter from Nazareth about whom the people made such strong claims. And yet, in his heart, he suspected something altogether different: perhaps this man truly was the Son of God. Perhaps he truly was the Messiah the Jews had been waiting for. Perhaps he truly was the light of the world.

And so Joseph had been forced into the agonising position of being a secret disciple, a disciple of the shadows, a disciple who had to live in the dark for fear of what stepping out into the light would do to his reputation.

Joseph was a disciple in the dark.

But now Jesus is dead and Joseph’s courage is strong: perhaps he is so appalled by what has happened that he just doesn’t care what people think anymore. Or perhaps his love for Jesus is so overwhelming, and he is so wracked with guilt that he never came out of the shadows and proclaimed his allegiance openly, that he realises he has one last opportunity to do right by Jesus. So Joseph, with great courage, goes to Pilate, and requests the body and the request is granted.

The disciple in the dark is now stepping out into the light…

But a corpse is a heavy weight to carry: certainly too much for one man and Joseph will need help. Who is there to ask? Perhaps Peter will help, or John, or Thomas, or Andrew. Oh, they can’t: they’ve run away, haven’t they?

So the disciples in the light are now in the dark as the disciple in the dark steps out into the light…

And emerging from the shadows with him is Nicodemus. We’ve come across Nicodemus before, of course. In John 3, Nicodemus came to visit Jesus and we are told that, like Joseph, he was a leader of the Jews. Like Joseph, he too was frightened of what his peers might think of his so in John 3:2, we are told that he “came to Jesus by night…”

And this disciple in the dark had proclaimed an early belief in Jesus, as we read in John 3:2 where Nicodemus says to Jesus: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” Jesus then engages Nicodemus in conversation and his words are very poignant for the disciple who comes to him in the dark: in 3:21, Jesus says to Nicodemus, “Those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”

Nicodemus, this disciple in the dark, had pondered these words in his heart for the last three years and now Christ has been crucified and he has decided that it is time to come out of darkness into light and undertake a deed that will be clearly seen by others.

The disciple in the dark is now stepping out into the light…

There are enormous social pressures on all of us when it comes to matters of faith. It seems that Christians always have to apologise for holding beliefs as if we are somehow intellectual Luddites standing against the Dawkin-esque flood of rational realism. We need to apologise for holding to fantasy beliefs about virgin births and dead men walking and seas being parted as if these stories exist on the same level as leprechauns at the end of the rainbow and Mr Benn finding a new identity in the Tailor’s Changing Room [I think I’ve just shown my age with that last simile!] The social pressure is such that we may feel forced, like Joseph and Nicodemus to be disciples in the dark, to believe in Jesus, to love Jesus, to honour Jesus but behind closed doors and under the cover of night. How else can we maintain our relationships with others? How else can we maintain our reputation as being a rational human being? How else can we hold down our jobs?

The temptation is to be a disciple in the dark…

But Jesus has been crucified and now it is time for us to join with Joseph and Nicodemus and reject the example of the twelve apostles and step out from the darkness into the light…

So Nicodemus comes with Joseph to collect Jesus’ body and he brings with him the spices for burial, a mixture of myrrh and aloes, weighing about one hundred pounds. Now, there is nothing extraordinary about the spices he brings; these would have been the usual spices to prepare a corpse for burial. But what is extraordinary is the sheer quantity of spices he brings. One hundred pounds of spices is quite incredible by anyone’s standards! What is Nicodemus thinking?

Perhaps his demonstration of extravagance is a public statement: like Joseph, who missed the boat by staying in the shadows as Jesus lived, Nicodemus missed the boat by doing the same. They both feel guilty – they both want to make amends - and they will both do so in the most public way possible: “Those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.” And the extravagance of Nicodemus mirrors two other stories of extravagance that he would have been well aware of.

First, Nicodemus would have remembered the wedding in Cana; an event that happened just before he came to Jesus the first time. At Cana, Jesus had set the precedence for extravagance by turning water into 180 gallons of wine. Now that is extravagance! That is a symbol of extravagant love!

And Nicodemus would no doubt have heard how, just 6 days earlier, Mary had taken 300 denarii worth of perfume anointed Jesus’ feet and wiped them with her hair. Judas had been fuming at this, of course, but Jesus had rebuked him, saying, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial.” Now that is extravagance! That is a symbol of extravagant love!

But Mary hadn’t saved the perfume for the day of Jesus’ burial, it had all been used up, so maybe Nicodemus is replacing the gift by purchasing 300 denarii worth of myrrh and aloes. Now that is extravagance! That is a symbol of extravagant love!

Jesus had shown extravagant love at Cana and on the cross.

Mary had shown extravagant love in Bethany.

Now it is time for Joseph and Nicodemus to show extravagant love.

It’s never too late: it’s not too late for Joseph and Nicodemus and it’s not too late for us…

So Joseph and Nicodemus, the disciples in the dark, step out into the light and they take Jesus body and lovingly wrap it in linen cloths, a reminder of the swaddling cloths that embraced Jesus at his birth. And they take the corpse to the new tomb and lay Jesus there.

We know the ending of the story – but Joseph and Nicodemus didn’t. As far as they knew, that was it…they had taken the risk, they had stepped out from the darkness into the light and now they would have to answer for their action.

They waited with bated breath…

And tonight, we wait with Joseph and Nicodemus, we wait with bated breath to see how the story unfolds tomorrow.

But, in the meantime – as we wait - we have the opportunity to join with Joseph and Nicodemus and step out from darkness into light. That is what this whole service is about: the light dispels the darkness and we are invited into that experience for ourselves: “Those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”

For us, our public profession of faith was made in our baptism vows. For some of us, that may have been recently, for others that may have been many years ago. But in a few moments time, we have the opportunity to renew our baptism vows and, as we do that, we are joining with Joseph and Nicodemus and metaphorically, we are stepping out from darkness into light. We stand together as one body and we publicly proclaim our faith in Jesus who is our light, who is the light of the world. And, as we confess our faith, as we step out from darkness into light, we commit ourselves afresh to a lifetime of living in the light.

We don’t want to return to the shadows. We want to bathe in the glorious light of Christ for whatever time is left to us here on earth and for all eternity.

For us now, this is a Joseph moment.

For us now, this is a Nicodemus moment.

We are no longer disciples in the dark: we are disciples of the light.

And our lives from this point forward will bear testimony to the light of Christ within us.

“Those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”

A sermon on Matthew 27:27-54

 “The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it”, some words from an early work by Karl Marx. And, of course, he is right and we need to guard against this ourselves. Because it is one thing to theorise and analyse, to have head knowledge only of our standing before God, but quite another to do something about it. The point is to change the world. Mahatma Gandhi said that the world can only change one person at a time, so we each have an individual responsibility to seek change within ourselves.

But we are aware that, as well as seeking change within ourselves, there is the need to work for change within the structures of society. Governments the word over do little to alleviate suffering. The church is too caught up in its internal discussions to make a real difference. Individuals are concerned primarily for personal well-being and gain - looking after Number One.

The point is to change the world.

The point is to change within ourselves before God.

The point is to change within society before God.

And if we earnestly desire that movement towards God, for ourselves and society, we must begin with the Cross of Christ. There was a Conference of Latin America Bishops in 1968 and they made this statement: “The centre of God’s salvation is Jesus Christ, who by his death and resurrection transforms the universe and makes it possible for man to reach fulfilment as a human being. This fulfilment embraces every aspect of humanity; body and spirit, individual and society, person and cosmos, time and eternity.”

If our desire is to make a better world, starting with ourselves, we must begin with Jesus Christ.

And, most specifically, we must begin with Holy Week. We know the story of Good Friday, we know the Passion Narratives, we read them almost in a blasé fashion because there are no surprises for us. But if we want to guard against the warning of Karl Marx and become doers, not merely philosophers, we need to engage with the story and allow it to determine in us a response that takes seriously our own needs and the needs of the world.

I don’t know what emotions Matthew’s account brings out in you. I feel immensely frustrated by Jesus because he’s so submissive to what goes on: I almost want to slap him, to shake him, and tell him to get his act together. The whole account is of a man who remains silent: Matthew only attributes one sentence to Jesus from the time of his humiliation at the hands of the soldiers to the time he dies.

Jesus is stripped of his clothes, he is mocked and humiliated, they spit on him and he remains silent.

Jesus is taken out to be crucified, they cast lots for his clothes, they pin a sarcastic sign above his head and he remains silent.

The passers-by mock him, they taunt him, he is abused by the robbers on the crosses next to him and he remains silent.

For three hours in agony he hangs on the cross and he remains silent.

And he dies.

And he’s put into a grave where he lies for three days and he remains silent.

We think often about the Words from the Cross but what comes over most powerfully from Matthew’s account is the silence of the cross. A silence that pervades the whole story. A silence that was interpreted by the other players in the story as weakness and defeat but, in reality, it was the very opposite as the Christian writer, Robert Benson, said: “It is in silence that God is known”.

The silence of the Passion story is where we find God. A God who endures everything for the love of each one of us. A God who submits himself to the very worst that we have to offer. A God who becomes weak so that we may know salvation. And somehow, the silence of Jesus shouts loudly against the violence done to him. He doesn’t need to justify himself. He doesn’t need to protect himself. He doesn’t need to speak out in his own defence. Because what Jesus stands for is truth and the truth will always prevail…

Winston Churchill said that, “Truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it, ignorance may deride it, malice may distort it, but there it is.” And that’s what we see in the cross of Jesus Christ. The Roman authorities resented Jesus and in their panic they crucified him. The passers-by were ignorant and they derided him. The chief priests and the scribes were full of malice towards Jesus and they distorted his teachings. But Jesus remains silent because when the panic and the derision and the malice have given all they’ve got, truth still stands and Christ will be raised on the third day.

And there is a model in that for ourselves if we want to respond to the Passion Narrative in Holy Week, that any change within ourselves, within society must begin with silence. Not a weak sort of silence. Not a silence that gives in to sin but a silence that allows God to speak.

Too often, we try to justify ourselves: we offer excuses to God for the things we do wrong, “It wasn’t my fault – I was pushed into it”. We offer excuses for Jesus to others as if we were ashamed of him and he needs our defence. We offer excuses for the way the world is, blaming others for the wrongs in society and never accepting our own part. But we need to learn to be silent to allow God to speak for himself. If we are silent before God, he will reveal to us our sin and shortcomings. If we share Christ with others and then wait in prayerful, loving silence, the Holy Spirit will convict them of the truth.

The writer of Ecclesiastes says, “There is a time to keep silence and there is a time to speak”. We need to know the difference. Because it is often in the silence that God makes himself known and when God makes himself known, things change…

But, of course, the cross isn’t just about silence: Christ speaks on the cross and Matthew records one saying: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In this one sentence, we have the ultimate cry of desolation, the feeling that, in this moment of supreme suffering, even God has deserted Jesus. And all the physical agony and pain that Jesus had to bear is as nothing compared with the emotional anguish of feeling so very alone. Perhaps some of us have experienced similar moments of despair, when life has reached such a pit of nothingness that we even feel that God has turned away from us. It is a common human experience and, of course, Jesus is only echoing here the words of David in Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? My God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night but I find no rest.” How many of us have experienced that depth of desolation? Many of us, I’m sure…

But it seems to me that, if the cross of Christ means anything, it is testimony to the fact that, no matter how desolate Jesus felt, no matter how desolate we may feel, God had not forsaken him and God does not forsake us. In fact, the very opposite is true: we can turn to the cross and see Jesus hanging there and look on his suffering, and his feelings of desolation and remember the sacrifice of love he makes there and all the filth and sin he had to carry and know that, even then, God had not deserted him.

And the proof comes three days later with an empty tomb.

God is not a deserter, he is not some patron saint of oppressors and persecutors. God remains faithful to us, despite our sin and betrayal, despite our pride and ambition, despite the fact that we so often forsake him. Even though sometimes we cry out in our human frailty, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” we can be assured by the empty tomb that God does not forsake us.

But this is Holy Week – Easter Day is still some days off…and we are left today with the words of Jesus: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And, of course, it is a cry of human agony and if we allow it to speak to us and shape our Christian love, then we will change, and the world will change. Jesus is the model of what it means to carry the feelings of forsakenness for other people.

And here is a challenge to us as we stammer our prayers to God for others, that if we want to be truly Christlike, we too need to carry the forsakenness of others to empathise with the pain and suffering of those we pray for…

…To come alongside the refugee and the persecuted Christian, those who are bereaved and the terminally ill, the homeless and those who have no hope…

…To stand with all those who feel forsaken by God and cry out to him with anguish in prayer…

When we pray for the needs of the world, we are not presenting God with a shopping list. We are standing alongside those in need just as Jesus stood alongside us at Golgotha. “Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it”. Holy Week and Easter provides the means for change; change within ourselves, within others and within the structures of society that reflect so little of God. That change begins with silence, allowing God to speak to us and convict us, knowing that the silence of truth shouts louder than the noise of all that is Anti-Christ.

But that change also involves speaking out, acknowledging our own feelings of forsakenness and speaking out to God and to those in authority on behalf of those in the world who have no voice for themselves.

The cross is silence.

The cross speaks out.

The cross makes real change possible.

Let us recommit ourselves this week to the God of the cross who speaks to us, even in the silence; the God who stretches out his arms to us in sacrificial love asking us to do the same and saying, “Follow me”. Amen.